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THE PULP AND PAPER SCENARIO - The Paper Tread: From Need to Greed Long time ago the need of our first ancestors to transmit words and images found their way on stone walls, clay tablets, wax-coated boards, animal hides and other media. Later, around 3000 B.C. the Egyptians began writing on papyrus reeds. Papyrus stalks were laminated into strips (as were bamboo slivers in China). Ts'ai Lun, a Chinese official, is credited with inventing the first real paper around A.D. 105 by pounding mulberry, hemp fishing nets and rags into a material that ultimately allowed the calligraphy brush to dance across a smooth surface. Rolled up scrolls remained the standard information storage unit until the codex, or folded leaf notebook, appeared around the fourth century A.D. Paper manufacturing techniques were transferred westward when an Arab army defeated Chinese forces in A.D. 751 and captured, among its war prisoners, a few papermakers who were later set up to practice their craft in Samarkand. Papermaking abilities then spread slowly from Islamic Asia to Europe. The Middle Ages in Europe remained a time of illiteracy, finally broken by Gutenberg's 15th-century invention of movable type. The publication of the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 and the subsequent rise of mass-produced books facilitated the broad dissemination of ideas and information. This triggered a demand for paper. At that time, rags provided the main source of fibre. In the 19th-century, French and English factory owners, struggling to overcome the power paper artisans held by virtue of their specialized knowledge, began to develop, with the help of the industrial revolution’s new machine tool industries, paper machines which centralized paper-making technique in capitalist hands. The advent of tree-based pulping provided a cheaper, more readily available fibre source (still, contempt for wood-based paper was so intense among local residents that deliveries of the tree pulp had to take place at night). The discovery of elemental chlorine in 1774 and the invention of the Fourdrinier continuous sheet paper machine, patented in 1807 eventually enabled manufacturers to chemically pulp and bleach wood fibres and to drastically boost production by creating rolls rather than individual sheets. It was not until the late nineteenth-century development of commercial techniques for pulping wood, a material which could be harvested at any time and easily stored and shipped in great volume, that the full potential of the new machine began to be realized. Conversely, once wood-based pulps had inaugurated an age of cheap, large-scale paper production in the mid-1800s, new commodities began to be developed which embedded paper use ever more thoroughly into business and household activities. Paper shirt collars, building materials and bags were soon supplemented by toilet paper, drinks cartons, nappies, fax and computer paper, and export packaging. In its present phase, the tree-based, globally oriented paradigm came to dominate 20th-century paper production as industrial manufacturing processes and forestry methods expanded. Global paper use has grown 423% from 1961 to 2002. By the mid-1980s, the environmental impact of tree-based papermaking surfaced to intense public scrutiny. Scientists realized that elemental chlorine, the main chemical used to separate and whiten wood fibres, combined with lignin produced dioxin, one of the most potent carcinogens and hormone disrupters (after incineration, pulp and paper mills are the second greatest source of dioxin and the largest source of dioxin contamination of water). Paper became associated with public health problems and the poisoning of fisheries. The international industry responded by investing in technologies that might lead to pollution reduction. The straight substitution of chlorine dioxide (ECF process) for chlorine gas has significantly reduced but in no way eliminated dioxin pollution. Also totally chlorine free (TCF) technologies were implemented --though its market share is marginal. ECF pulp dominates the world bleached chemical pulp market with more than two-thirds of the world market share (75%), followed by the traditional elemental chlorine gas at around 20%, while TCF production maintained a small niche market at just over 5% (2002 figures). However, new evidence shows that problems persist in either technologies. There appears to be no correlation between AOX (absorbable organic halogens, a surrogate measure of the amount of chlorinated organic compounds in pulp and paper effluent discharge) discharge levels and environmental impact in studies of specific responses of fish. In addition, other observations have documented a variety of lesions in fish sampled adjacent to a mill using sodium hydrosulphite as a bleaching agent, with no chlorine chemicals in use. Also, the concentrations of metals present in TCF wastewaters have been found to be higher than in other bleachery effluents. Overall, such studies demonstrated that while environmental improvements could be achieved by process changes --and the elimination of chlorine based chemicals was a key factor in such improvements--, effluents from all processes were toxic to some degree. Furthermore, every stage of paper production, from the cutting of trees to disposal of paper into landfills, significantly adds to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. All these risks are being magnified by the ever increasing scale of new mills. One fifth of all wood harvested in the world ends up in paper, and it takes 2 to 3.5 tons of trees to make one ton of paper. On the other hand, pulp and paper is the 5th largest industrial consumer of energy in the world. Also, in some Northern countries paper accounts for nearly 40 percent of all municipal solid waste. With global annual growth forecast at 2.5%, the industry and its negative impacts could double by 2025. All this worrying data should lead us to consider the ultimate reason of exposing the environment and the people to such risks. Is it the unavoidable cost that human society has to pay for the sake of literacy, information, culture? Or is present paper consumption linked to the modern living’s disposable pattern? In terms of the uses of paper, packaging now outweighs communication grades. Although paper is traditionally identified with reading and writing, communications has now been replaced by packaging as the single largest category of paper use. The real expansion in paper packaging has come since the 1950s with the spread of supermarkets and pre-packed food (though in some cases it is declining both as a consequence of overall reductions in packaging and as a result of substitution by other materials, notably plastics). The electronic information revolution has to date multiplied rather than replaced paper use, and a number of other factors such as advertising and food retailing also influence specific patterns of paper consumption, notably the demand for newsprint and packaging papers. The overwhelming majority of paper is used as an input to other manufacturing sectors: demand is therefore filtered via other industries and is rarely a direct response on the part of final consumers. In the USA, only 15% of paper production is bought directly by final consumers. From the point of view of consumption, the trend is in line with the gross inequities that allow for the accumulation and centralization pattern of market globalization and a gulf separates paper consumption in North and South: the U.S. is by far the world’s largest producer and consumer of paper. The average U.S. citizen consumes 27 times the amount of paper used each year by the average inhabitant of the South, while many African countries now consume less paper per capita than in 1975. Consumerism and poverty live together
in an unbalanced world where there is no political will to stop
the wasteful over-consumption of some people and to enhance the
standard of living of those in most need. Present paper (over) consumption
is based on mortgaging humankind’s future, and mainly to the
benefit of a few corporations which control the global market through
manipulation of markets, cartel agreements, price fixing and other
similar practices. The size of large paper firms --the sales figures
of International Paper alone rank above the Gross Domestic Product
of more than 75 countries-- make them influencing political as well
as economic actors whose profit-driven operations hold major responsibility
in the shaping of the present environmental, social and economic
crisis. Huge supermarkets and shopping centres are the new cathedrals
of the modern consumer society which makes room for just an elite
--28% of the world population, mainly from Northern countries, whose
consumption habits have led to an unsustainable situation because
of the huge consumption of water, energy, wood, minerals, soil and
other resources, and the loss of biodiversity, contamination, deforestation
and climate change.
Pulp mills process timber in order to obtain the main raw material for paper production: pulp. They are usually large factories located close to where timber is cut, that is to say, near forests or monoculture tree plantations, from where the logs can be easily transported, thus cutting costs. Basically, wood comprises lignin and cellulose fibres and the first step to obtain pulp is to crush the solid wood. Depending on the processes used, two types of pulp are to be distinguished. * Mechanical pulp. Mechanical processes crush wood and release the fibres. This process turns up to 95 per cent of the wood into pulp, but keeps the lignin, which gives the paper a brown or yellow tint. This type of pulp is mainly used for newspapers and other products where the quality of the print is not too important. * Chemical pulp. Solid wood is first broken down into small wood chips, which are then processed with chemicals, followed by a process of refinery. Chemical extraction separates the lignin from the cellulose, that remains as the final product. This is achieved by means of hydrolysis (a reaction using water) under high temperature, using chemicals and a large amount of energy. Depending on the chemicals used, different processes can be identified: 1) the Kraft or sulphate process (presently the most commonly used), which cooks the wood chips with caustic soda; 2) the sulphite process (that predominated in the paper industry from the end of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century) which cooks the wood chips in an acid solution; and 3) the chemical thermo-mechanical process, where the chips are steam-heated and then treated with chemicals before crushing them. Depending on the process and the type of wood used, different kinds of pulp are obtained: long fibre (from conifers) and short fibre (other tree species, with some exceptions). The importance of this difference regarding paper is that the long fibre paper is more flexible, and is therefore generally used for newspaper. Pulp produced both through mechanical or chemical processes, usually requires bleaching. There are various types of bleaching: 1) using chlorine gas (also known as elemental chlorine); 2) elemental chlorine-free (ECF) using chlorine dioxide (within this technique ECF has also been developed using ozone in the initial stages of the bleaching process and chlorine dioxide in the final stages, and “improved” ECF, which eliminates most of the lignin that gives the yellow colouring before bleaching, thus reducing the use of energy and chemicals for the process); and 3) “Totally Chlorine Free” (TCF), that is to say, bleaching without chlorine compounds, using oxygen and hydrogen peroxide or ozone. The public discussion on pulp bleaching started in the mid-eighties. The analysis revealed a high concentration of AOX (a parameter measuring the total concentration of chlorine linked to organic compounds in wastewater) in pulp plant effluents, and later dioxins were also found. Dioxin is the common name for a family of chemical compounds (there are 77 different forms of dioxins), showing similar properties and toxicity; they appear as a result of thermal processes involving organic products with chlorine and have serious effects on health and the environment, heightened by their persistence and accumulation. The world production of bleached chemical pulp has increased over the past 15 years from 56 million to close on 90 million tons. According to 2002 figures, approximately 20 per cent of the world pulp production is chemically bleached using the traditional chlorine gas and about 75 per cent is bleached with chlorine-dioxide by the ECF process, while just a little over 5 per cent is bleached by the TCF process. - The problems of pulp mills Pulp mills are increasing in size and production capacity, worsening the impacts of their industrial process that already presents serious environmental risks. Some risk factors can be identified: * Size (scale) Today’s pulp mills are mega-factories and their very size makes them a risk. In an industrial process using so many toxic chemicals, any small detail that is altered, any small release is magnified because of the scale of the factory. Furthermore, toxic chemical releases may be small as compared to the volumes processed, but not with the magnitude nature can support. The effluents from a large 600.000 metric ton plant are approximately 1000 litres per second. * Smell (emissions) Emissions into the air by pulp mills (from the incineration of tons of residue left over from the process and used in energy generation) contain cancerigenic chemicals (chlorinated phenolics, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and Volatile Organic Compounds), oxidized sulphur compounds causing damage to vegetation, compounds causing hormone imbalance (such as the chlorinated phenols) and reduced sulphur compounds causing the classical penetrating “rotten egg” smell that becomes a problem for the surrounding inhabitants. Recent epidemiological studies show evidence of possible effects on health caused by exposure to these compounds at levels usually present near a pulp mill. A Finnish study (The South Karelia Air Pollution Study) shows that exposure to bad-smelling sulphur compounds increases the risk of acute respiratory infections. * Problems with the production of bleaching agents Many chemical bleaches are reactive and dangerous to transport and for this reason must be made in situ or near by. This is the case of chlorine dioxide (Cl02), an extremely reactive greenish yellow gas that explodes easily, representing a major threat to the workers and the neighbouring inhabitants in the event of an accident. Another agent used, elemental chlorine (Cl2), is very toxic. It is a greenish gas that is corrosive in the presence of dampness. * Effluents and water pollution The enormous demand for water in pulp mills may reduce the level of water and the effluents may increase the temperature, a critical issue for the river ecosystem. Generally, mills are installed near a watercourse with a good flow where they can get their supply (at a lower cost) and also discharge their effluents. The pulp industry is the second largest consumer of chlorine and the greatest source of direct discharge of toxic organochlorines into watercourses. Pulp production processes that can potentially cause more pollution are the chemical methods, in particular those producing Kraft pulp, as the effluents may contain organic compounds present in the pulp and chlorine compounds that when combined can form a series of toxic products such as dioxins, furans and other organochlorines (also known as Absorbable Organic Halogens/AOX), each having different degrees of toxicity. The serious problem with these compounds is that their capacity for biodegradation is very limited, meaning that they remain in the biosphere for many years after they are no longer being released, building up over time in the tissues of living organisms (bioaccumulation). This means that concentrations in the fatty tissue of superior organisms (including human beings) are higher than the concentrations present in the environment where they were exposed, making this an important human health problem. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), exposure to minute levels of dioxin (measured in trillionths of a gram) can result in alterations of the human immune system and of endocrine hormone activity, including the regulation of sex steroids and growth, and inheritable genetic changes. Not forgetting, of course, cancer. Among the major sources of dioxin emissions is elemental chlorine pulp bleaching. In the case of the effluents of chlorine dioxide bleached pulp, these contain chloroform, chlorinated acids and sulfones. Chlorine dioxide bleaching produces large amounts of chlorate, which acts as a herbicide. It has been proven that although effluents are more biodegradable than with the elemental chlorine technique and that the presence of organochlorines has been reduced, they continue to be produced and to affect the environment. Although liquid effluents are less toxic than they were ten years ago, they are still dangerous because they are persistent pollutants, that is to say, that they are permanently accumulating and do not degrade. Furthermore, in addition to the effects
of organochlorines, towards the end of 1994 the conviction took
shape that substances contained in wood become problem compounds
during the pulp extraction process, as fish affected by effluents
from the production of bleached and non-bleached pulp showed toxic
effects. Dissolved wood substances, chemical residues and compounds
produced by reactions between chemical substances and wood substances
produce pollutants that may reduce the oxygen levels in the watercourses
where they are released and prove lethal to fish. On the basis of these problems, there is reason to wonder whether the aforementioned risks related to pulp and paper mills are justified in the name of some general welfare, whether this activity aims at meeting genuine human needs or has contributed to alleviate poverty. According to the following reports and testimonies, the answer is no. Pulp mills are just one link in the chain of an unsustainable “development” pattern which allows big economic interests to secure their power. Article based on information provided
by: the consultant, Rune Leithe Eriksen, e-mail: rune@rle.se
; Chemical Engineer Camilo Barreiro, e-mail: camilobarreiro@yahoo.com
; and information from: “Industria del papel y de la pasta
de papel: sectores basados en recursos biológicos”,
Enciclopedia de Salud y Seguridad en el Trabajo, http://www.mtas.es/insht/EncOIT/pdf/tomo3/72.pdf
; “Compuestos Organoclorados como Contaminantes Persistentes:
el caso de las dioxinas y los bifenilos policlorados”, http://es.geocities.com/pirineosjuan/organoclorados.html
; “The Case Against Chlorine Dioxide”, Miranda Holmes,
Georgia Strait Alliance and Delores Broten, Reach for Unbleached,
http://www.bcen.bc.ca/bcerart/Vol7/thecasea.htm
, “Missing Monitoring What should be monitored but isn't”,
Reach for Unbleached!, http://www.rfu.org/MonMiss.htm
; “Towards a Sustainable Paper Cycle”, prepared for
the World Business Council for Sustainable Development by the International
Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), 1996 ; “Causes
for Concern: Chemicals and Wildlife”; prepared for WWF by
Valerie Brown, M.S., December 2003, http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/causeforconcern01.pdf
; “Trends in World Bleached Chemical Pulp Production: 1990-2002”,
http://aet.org/reports/market/aet_trends_2002.html
- Pulp Mills and Tree Plantations: A Duo in Power The dispossession, deforestation and
pollution caused by the pulp and paper industry is tied to a dynamic
of ever-increasing scale, concentration and capital intensiveness
which has characterized the industry since the Industrial Revolution.
Crucial to this dynamic are attempts by the industry and its allies
to refashion the political and physical infrastructure through which
they work, capturing subsidies, managing demand, centralizing power,
and evading, digesting and regulating resistance. In such a context,
the claim that the industry helps society meet its pre-existing
needs "more efficiently" makes little sense. * Pulp and paper companies do not alter society's goals and needs but leave them untouched; they merely provide wealth, goods and jobs which help society do better what it is doing already. * It is merely the drive to do so efficiently and competitively which causes such firms to increase the size of pulp and paper installations and to seek cheaper production sites around the world. * Any social and environmental disruption which results from this expansion requires at most some adjustments to the market apparatus or state regulatory systems, not a rethink of the industry's scale, structure or political relationships with the rest of society. Despite these claims, the industry's current drive towards larger scale and global expansion cannot be explained solely by "economics". But neither is it being driven by a political conspiracy of unseen masterminds in transnational corporation boardrooms acting with the careless ease of omnipotence. Social structures sensitive to the needs of pulp and paper elites are built, expanded and improved upon only through the political efforts of a multitude of agents with different interests and motivations, working together in an ad hoc and sometimes uncoordinated fashion in interaction with an ever-varying background of resistance and of the varied qualities of land and natural materials. The evolution of pulp and paper technology has always been intertwined not merely with profit or efficiency but with the attempt of small elites to rearrange structures of power in their favour. The switch from rags to wood as a raw material reinforced papermakers' reliance on large, highly-mechanized mills -- for one thing, the chipping equipment and stone grinders used to process logs produced too much pulp for small paper mills to absorb. Yet the more that the pulp and paper industry invested in huge, wood-adapted pulp and paper machines, integrated with the timber industry and decoupled from any other source of raw materials, the less inclined the trade became to consider any other approach. Today, 90 per cent of paper pulp is made of wood, either by grinding it up or chipping and boiling it in strong chemicals. Large quantities of fresh water and energy are required for the process, which consumes annually the rough equivalent of the timber that would cover 20,000 square kilometers of wooded land. Status competition among early twentieth-century newspaper magnates in North America and Britain to build ever-bigger paper machines contributed further to growth in scale. By 1975, major machine manufacturers' investment in large machine tools had made it difficult for them to produce for anyone but the largest paper investors. Access to the dominant stream of papermaking knowledge was now restricted not just to capital, but to big capital. Today, most of the pulped wood used to manufacture newsprint, packaging board and writing paper today flows from a small number of sprawling plants, shining with expensive, computer-assisted machinery and costing up to US$1 billion or more apiece. One consequence of the fact that almost all new investment in pulp is large-scale is that any surge in demand inevitably results in more investment in productive capacity than is actually required to meet it. This in turn leads to a savage boom-and-bust cycle. In 1993, for example, after one bout of overinvestment, pulp prices dropped to half of what they had been four years previously, leading to rampant losses, cost-cutting, closures, mergers and takeovers. It is not surprising that the industry feels pressure to create new demand in a way which might moderate future price dips. Large scale can be a cause as well as an effect of efforts to reorganize society in ways friendly to a few central actors. The giant pulping machines characterizing today’s industry have to be run nearly 24 hours a day if the massive debts incurred in their construction are to be paid off on schedule. This reinforces the mills' need for secure, convenient access to huge supplies of water, wood – and enormous, contiguous, dedicated areas of land. Today’s gigantic pulp mills find it almost impossible to share the landscapes they occupy with local communities pursuing a variety of agricultural, fishing and subsistence-gathering activities. They work far better with simplified, compact populations of factory-friendly trees than with, for example, native woodlands reserved for a variety of uses. In addition, today’s big mills demand the construction of roads or waterways which run straight from cutting site to port or factory instead of a web of slow systems of transport linking one local area to another. They favour the growth of mill towns where everyone works for the industry rather than communities with diverse livelihoods. All this provides incentives for propagating an ideology which privileges a supposedly "global" demand for pulp over varied local demands for individual farm plots, diverse native woodlands, clean water and air, and the maintenance of fine-grained craft practices which make possible local control over native forests and wetlands. The pulp and paper industry often justifies its preference for large-scale, single-centred systems over many-centred social mosaics by claiming that they help release latent economic "efficiencies". However, the demand which is to be met “efficiently” had to be created first, and landscapes homogenized by political means, before this talk of “efficiencies” could begin to make sense. From the point of view of a farmer in, say, South-East Asia, the engineering of today’s centralized pulp and paper systems entails uncompensated losses of water, soil, fodder, fish, transport, or livelihood generally – hardly a gain in “efficiency” from perspective. As native forests are exhausted and local resistance provoked, pulp and paper industries are turning increasingly to industrial tree plantations to furnish large amounts of fresh, uniform raw material on a smaller land base, avoiding conflict with other land uses. Although industrial plantations currently supply about a quarter of world demand for pulpwood(2000 figure), this proportion is bound to rise, given deforestation, the limitations of recycling (fibres can only be reused a few times before disintegrating into dust), and the resistance of much of the industry to non-wood materials. This shift to plantation pulpwood provides more incentives for the industry to move raw fibre production to new regions, especially to the South. In countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, trees such as eucalyptus or acacia grow faster, land is cheaper, and companies are able to benefit from lower-cost labour and severer political repression than in the North. All this entails low prices for wood, which, as Robert A. Wilson of the Anglo-French conglomerate Arjo Wiggins Appleton remarks, is "the strategic driver in the industry . . . the key competitive differentiator." Pulp mills are often integrated with the new Southern plantations. This is not only because it makes more economic sense to combine wood and pulp production than to keep them separate, and to export fibre in the more concentrated form of pulp than in the watery form of wood chips, but also because environmental regulations are looser in the South than in the North, foreign aid subsidies easier to obtain, and consumption, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, likely to grow faster. Thus Brazil and Chile, for example, none of whom have been traditionally strong in the pulp and paper industry, are now among the top ten exporters of pulp, their principal customers being in industrialized countries. Indonesia‘s production of pulp rose from 980,000 tons in 1987 to 8 million tons in late 2000. In sum, today's large pulp and paper firm, like a biological organism, is constrained by its inheritances -- including immense, unwieldy machines and a reliance on wood fibre -- and owes its survival largely to a whole array of actors behind the scenes: consultancy companies, technology suppliers, industry associations and alliances, bilateral agencies, State investment and export credit agencies, multilateral agencies, national governments, research institutes and NGOs, with which it has evolved in cooperation or symbiosis. Like a plant or animal, such a company does not adapt passively to a fixed environment, but, with the help of its allies, constantly recreates it -- undermining forms of power necessary for stewardship of local land while extending the realm of uniform rules of exchange; constructing new financial, physical, legal, and cultural networks by which resources and subsidies can be pumped to central locations and new forms of influence exercised over workers and resisters; recanalizing customs and dreams into forms satisfiable through paper consumption; and attempting to substitute public relations for the risks of democratic debate. Large, destructive technologies, rocketing consumer demand and the growing phenomenon of globalization are products less of "economics" than of politics. Excerpted and adapted from: “Pulp,
Paper and Power: How an Industry Reshapes its Social Environment”,
Larry Lohmann, 1995, The Corner House, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/document/pulp.html
; Mercado mundial de la celulosa, http://www.papelnet.cl/celulosa/mercado_mundial.htm
; “Timber Market Trends: Global and Southern Perspectives”,
Bob Abt and Fred Cubbage, http://natural-resources.ncsu.edu/wps/wp/fps/ABTCUBBA.PDF
- How the Pulp Industry Tries to Manage Resistance Pulp mills’ extremely large scale makes it necessary for them to simplify under a central authority not only landscapes, biological diversity and genetic diversity, but also political systems. The sheer size of the mills and the landscape they reorganize around them means that to survive, they need constantly to attract subsidies, stimulate demand – and above all, control resistance, both from ordinary people and from the landscape. Where opposition does not challenge the pulp and paper industry's most fundamental interests, it will attempt to contain it by internally redistributing its considerable resources in various ways, relieving tensions in one area through slack in another. For example, the industry will try to: * Buy off resisters or attempt to demonstrate to them how their concerns can be “met” within the industrial system, through, for example, bribes, contract farming schemes, promises of “economic development". * Help see to it that resisters are crushed by force, assuming that they are isolated, small-scale, poorly-coordinated, and out of the public eye, and the government sees it as in its own interest to foot the military bill. * Insist on discussing the issues in public only in the idiom of orthodox economics and "global demand" rather than in the languages of ordinary farmers or of politics. * Give in to certain demands made by opponents, if they cannot be bought off or persuaded to modify their demands, if suppression is difficult, or if industry interests are relatively unaffected. Japan's paper industry, for example, has had simply to accept environmentalist resistance to its exploitation of Western North American lands and shift its search for raw materials elsewhere. By the same token, Western industry is slowly capitulating to opposition to the use of chlorine in pulp treatment, and finds it easy for the industry to give in to demands for more recycling given that it is long accustomed to using waste paper as a raw material. Some opposition, however, presents deeper threats. No paper corporation possesses the resources to adjust itself to falling demand for all its products, nor, faced with community-based opposition to plantations across very large areas of the South, to buy it off everywhere it arises, smash it wholesale, or shift its search for raw materials to another planet. Such challenges, impossible either to accommodate or to crush outright, are met most intelligently by the ancient strategy of divide and conquer. Abandoning attempts either to conciliate or to wipe out groups with which it has irreconcilable conflicts at the grassroots, industry instead concentrates its attention on keeping those groups divided from potential allies in bureaucracies and in urban and Northern middle classes. Thus pulp and paper interests in Indonesia and other countries have resorted to repression and abuses at home while hiring public relations firms such as the US's Burson Marsteller to present a softer picture to customers and legislators in the West, as well as to infiltrate, undermine and monitor Western environmental groups. Industry-retained public relations firms also attempt to marginalize as "radical" or "irresponsible" movements for reduction of paper consumption in the West. Some years ago Arjo Wiggins Appleton
executives O. Fernandez Carro and Robert A. Wilson summed up such
strategies when they urged their colleagues not to target "apparent
opposition" if that means "forgetting the vast mass in
between: the public"; not to "respond to the mobile agenda
of others" but rather to "write the agenda and diffuse
negative issues". Politics, they went on, “provides the
packaging and the vehicle to achieve the industrial objectives.
Success is measured by the freedom to plant fibre crops, recognizing
the sum total of all the political forces (in the broadest sense).
There are two elements to the political subsystem [of the total
quality system of industrial forestry]: the message and the target.
The message needs to be short, nontechnical, and fundamental: for
example, ‘Trees are good. We need more trees not less’.
Our objective should be to create and move inside an ever-increasing
friendly circle of public opinion.” * Demand for paper comes not from particular groups, classes, or societies, but rather from "the globe" or "the nation" as a whole, which is seen as having a moral status superior to that of local people defending their land or water. This idea helps license cross-regional and cross-class subsidies for the industry, as well as large forced evictions. * Pulpwood plantations are an economically productive use of unoccupied, degraded land. This "message" is effective only with environmentalists unaware of industry thinking and practice at the grassroots. As the Asian Development Bank and Shell International have both pointed out, industry is not particularly interested in degraded land. What it requires instead is contiguous chunks of "land suitable for superior biological growth rates for those species the market wants" as well as "year-round water" and easy access to transportation. The message also cannot be used with groups who understand that what counts as "degraded" or "unused" depends entirely on who is talking. * Plantation expansion helps make underdeveloped countries "self-sufficient" in paper. This "message" can be usefully employed with audiences unaware, for example, that Indonesia's or Brazil’s new pulp capacity is aimed largely at export; and that “self-sufficiency” in one or another paper grade counts for little in the face of the liberal trade policies advocated by the industry itself, which will push pulp and paper imports into any country not producing them more cheaply. * Plantations are up to ten times more productive than natural forests. This "message" narrowly defines "productivity" as "productivity of trees with market value as pulpwood over two or three growing cycles". It is useful only with audiences unaware of other ways of being “productive” of more interest to local peoples, such as growing crops and maintaining surface water and community woodlands. * Promulgating plantation "guidelines" will make plantations "sustainable". This message appeals mainly to Northern academics, technocrats and environmentalists unaware of or indifferent to what actually happens on the ground in areas in which pulp plantations have been, for example, certified by the FSC. Such "messages", used selectively, encourage the globalization of the pulp and paper industry by helping block alliances between grassroots groups fighting monoculture pulpwood plantations and environmental groups elsewhere, particularly in the North. Yet the converse is also true. It is only the global reach of the contemporary pulp and paper industry -- its ability to exploit the spatial and cultural distance between residents of rural areas in plantation zones and intelligentsias elsewhere -- that allow it to spread its oversimplifications and falsehoods to ensure acquiescence in industrial tree plantation development among largely urban and Northern power bases. This support is crucial, since a ballooning "free market" in wood fibre, pulp and paper can be constructed and coordinated only if the subsidies given to consultants, foresters, aid agencies, and non-governmental organizations to promote plantations can be justified before a large and diffuse public. To use such mystifications, however, is always to gamble that they will not be exposed through the international coordination of plantation opponents. By: Larry Lohmann, e-mail: larrylohmann@gn.apc.org
[from “Freedom to Plant: Indonesia and Thailand in a Globalizing
Pulp and Paper Industry in Parnwell, Michael J. G. and Bryant, Raymond,
eds., Environmental Change in South-East Asia: Rendering the Human
Impact Sustainable, Routledge, London, 1996.]
- Schoolbooks, Shops and Subsidies: Renegotiating Paper Consumption Ashis Nandy, the Indian psychologist and social critic, once defined progress as "growth in the awareness of oppression". What he meant, in part, is that we are fortunate that due to the rise of feminist movements we are more aware of the way women have been exploited than formerly, that due to anti-racist struggles we are clearer about many of the ways of oppression, and that due to the long hours radical scholars put in at their libraries we understand economic exploitation better. And who could deny that paper consumption
-- writing materials, books -- have played a part in all this? In today's world, it is impossible even to equate paper consumption with literacy, let alone progress. US citizens currently consume 1.7 times more paper per capita than British people, four times more than Malaysians and 83 times more than Indians. Does it follow that they are 83 times more literate than Indians, 4 times more literate than Malaysians and 1.7 times more literate than the British? Or consider another example: the single-year increase in per capita consumption of paper between 1993 and 1994 in Sweden was double the total (!) per capita consumption of Indonesia. This suggests that to understand what paper consumption is really about, we need to look at what paper is used for, and the power struggles out of which current patterns of its consumption have developed. Two centuries ago the modern paper-making machine was invented in France -- on the account of its own inventor, not to meet the needs of children clamouring for schoolbooks, but to take power away from paper artisans at a time of artisan unrest and put it more into hands of machine financers and managers. It wasn't until a century later, when the invention of wood-based pulps inaugurated the era of cheap paper, that consumption began to take off and many of the uses of paper we know today began to be found. That's also when the paper-producing industry began to be wedded to its current dynamic of ever-increasing scale, capital intensity, large-scale industrial forestry, and recurring cycles of excess capacity. Trapped by this dynamic, the industry has been constantly haunted by what David Clark, a European paper industrialist, has recently called the "need to create our own growth [and] stimulate demand". Luckily for the industry, a number of powerful actors with their own political and economic agendas have continually lent a hand. Over the last century, for example, manufacturers of food, soap, medicine and other goods have been constantly developing and redeveloping a remarkable invention: the modern paper or cardboard package. One thing the package did was to eliminate shop staff who, many manufacturers felt, stood between them and potential consumers. If you don't have to ask a shopkeeper to get you something, but can merely pick a package off a shelf and pay for it, it's often a lot easier to buy it. Paper packaging, with its built-in colourful advertising, also made possible an explosion in "impulse" buying: purchases of things you didn't know you wanted until you saw them. Small wonder, then, that over the 20th century, shops have been progressively turned into warehouses of individually wrapped, coloured packages containing their own sales pitches and constantly replenished by long-distance transport using still other types of paper packaging. The new type of consumption stimulated by supermarkets, of course, fed back into increased demand for yet more paper packages. Today by far the largest use for paper -- over 40 per cent of production -- is not for books, not for newspapers, not for needy schoolchildren's notepads, not for indigent university students' studies, but in packaging and wrapping. An increasing proportion of the rest is devoted to advertising, mail-order catalogues, junk mail, disposable nappies, and computer paper. Even in the South, where there are real shortages of reading and writing materials, the biggest focus of paper marketing is not on goods to aid literacy, but rather on disposable nappies, tissues and the like. Another part of constructing paper demand has consisted in simply moving the effects of production out of sight. By making sure that the people affected by the monoculture plantations established to feed paper pulp factories are not your neighbours and have no way of contacting or influencing you to convince you to rethink paper manufacture and paper subsidies, industry ensures that manufacturers and consumers will have fewer second thoughts about increasing their paper use. By taking advantage of cheap land or forced labour or government-subsidized waste sinks, in addition, moving production around the globe helps keep consumer prices low and consumption growing. Dividing people from other people along power lines, race lines and gender lines is part of what consumption is all about. Thus when the Japanese paper industry's supply of cheap wood residues from the US Pacific Northwest began to run out, threatened by environmentalist opposition and physical shortage, it simply expanded its operations in Indonesia, Thailand, Australia, PNG, Viet Nam, Siberia, Fiji, Chile, Brazil, New Zealand, Hawaii and elsewhere, leaving a trail of rural destruction and social strife all around the Pacific Rim. Demand for paper, in short, like demand for many consumer goods, does not simply arise from people's pre-existing desires for basic necessities or even for progress. But nor is it simply imposed unilaterally on people by corporations and their helpers. Its construction is the result of two centuries of continuing social and class struggle and maneuver among many different groups over matters as diverse as industrial structure, access to information, and the cultural meanings of time, work and leisure. It follows that consumption is going to undergo as many changes in the future as it has in the past. There's no reason why some of these changes, instead of increasing consumption in still more irrational and degrading ways, may not instead bring consumption once again under human control. The question, of course, is how to do this. Here there must be many avenues of experiment. But all of them are bound to stress the close connections among consumption, production and power politics. Companies engage in politics when they work at managing consumption. Bringing consumption under more democratic control also requires political action. At a minimum that means bringing to light connections which corporations often work to conceal. It means opening channels of information and contact between consumers and affected people that have been blocked by corporate interest and cultural barriers. It means helping to make it possible for consumers and affected people to enter into a new, more civilized kind of negotiation over what reasonable consumption might consist in -- a negotiation less dominated and mediated by industry. It means imagining ways of setting prices which take account of hidden subsidies for repression and environmental violence. Consumption, in short, is simply too important a matter to be left to corporations and people’s consuming selves. People are not only consumers but political actors and citizens, and with the political parts of their brains it's time to think new thoughts. It's not enough to say that "if we want change it's up to us as individual consumers to alter our buying habits and pioneer new lifestyles". Saying that may be a good way of making people feel guilty or confused. But any action it inspires, because it will be likely to spring from personal guilt rather than from learning, or from anger at exploitation, or from solidarity with those who are being stomped on, is not likely to be very effective. Do the problems of consumption begin with you as an individual? And do the solutions depend only on the choices you make as an individual consumer? To think that is more likely to make you want to withdraw from society than to engage with it. To say that paper consumption can be dealt with merely through the blunt instrument of standing in front of a supermarket shelf and deciding which brand to buy -- or not to buy at all -- is to deceive yourself. The labels on these products may ask you to choose them, but they can't tell you what happens if you do or don't buy the product. They won't allow you to negotiate with the people affected by its production, and, if the company's advertising agency or PR firm have done their job, will conceal from you as much as possible about the political history which went into the product's development. If any problems require collective action, it is precisely those thrown up by modern consumption. “Feelbad” recriminations about individual consumption are likely to lead only to superficial “feelgood” solutions rather than meaningful social action. Rather than Northern overconsumers blaming themselves for having been made ignorant about the effects of consumption, it's perhaps time for them to join with others to counter the structures which make them so. Rather than taking for granted that their interests are necessarily opposed to those of others far away who produce the goods or raw materials they use, it's perhaps time to undertake some projects to see what struggles North and South might have in common. Rather than assume that increasing consumption of everything in sight is biological destiny, it's perhaps time to bring into play more of what Henry James called the "civic use of the imagination" in seeing what other, more humane futures people might negotiate for themselves. By: Larry Lohmann, e-mail: larrylohmann@gn.apc.org
(excerpted from a talk on consumption given in 1998 at a meeting
of People and Planet, the University of Warwick, UK)
- The mythical correlation between literacy and paper consumption The present scenario, where most countries have become mere markets for an increasingly reduced group of powerful corporations that share them between themselves while keeping up a network of commercial links --for which they want to have more and more elbow room--, has also been built up with language and the introduction of concepts that are imposed as truths. Thus, regarding paper and its imposition as a product of growing consumption, the language has been used to create a misleading correlation between paper consumption and literacy, implying that more paper is required (and therefore more plantations to feed more pulp mills) to supply increasingly literate populations with reading and writing material. The fallacy of such a simplification is demonstrated by the simple comparison of literacy rates and the per capita annual consumption of paper and cardboard, using the FAO and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as information sources (figures for year 2000). On the following list, we have selected a few countries with high literacy rates in order to analyze the subject, but the sources mentioned at the end of the article show that the situation is the same in practically all the countries of the world.
It clearly follows from the above that Northern countries with identical literacy rates (99%) have very different consumptions of paper and cardboard from one another, whereas Southern countries with high levels of literate population consume less, or even much less, than the former. This situation does not correlate with unsatisfied paper needs, but with a wasteful consumption - particularly in the North - that has nothing to do with the satisfaction of human needs. In short, the argument that a growing literate population requires a growing amount of paper is just one of many deceptions made up to justify the profits of the pulp and paper sector. There is no “hunger” for paper: there is an immense wastage. Article based on information from: World
Resources Institute, Paper and paperboard consumption per capita,
FAO data 2000, http://earthtrends.wri.org/text/ENG/variables/573.htm
; UNDP, Human Development Index, Adult literacy rate, 2000, http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2002/en/indicator/indicator.cfm?File=indic_277_1_1.html
- Genetically engineered trees: The pulp industry's dangerous "solution" Making clean white paper from trees is a dirty business. To make bleached kraft pulp, trees are chipped, cooked under pressure, washed and then bleached. Toxic chemicals are used in the cooking process to remove lignin, a glue-like substance that holds wood cells together and makes trees strong. As lignin causes yellowing of paper, any lignin remaining has to be bleached. Forestry scientists believe they have found a way of making paper from trees less polluting. Through genetic engineering they can produce trees with reduced levels of lignin or with lignin that can be more easily extracted. "The costly portion of the pulp and paper making process, from both an economic and environmental perspective, is attributable to the removal of lignins. Therefore, it is highly desirable to develop means by which lignin content is decreased, or make lignins more extractable," explained forest scientists from Oxford University and Oregon State University in a paper published in Plant Biotechnology Journal in 2003. David Herod, a biotechnologist at the US Department of Agriculture argues that the scientists have everything under control. "We are using the best available science to make sure this technology is used safely," he told Associated Press in 2001. Unfortunately, the best available science is part of the problem. The risks associated with reduced-lignin GM trees include trees which are weakened structurally and which are more vulnerable to storms. Reduced-lignin trees are more susceptible to viral infections. Reducing lignin can reduce trees' defences to pest attack, which would lead to increased pesticide use. Low-lignin trees will rot more readily, with serious impacts on soil structure and forest ecology. If reduced-lignin GM trees were to cross with forest trees these impacts would not be limited to plantations. Trees that cannot resist storms and which are at risk from attack by pests and viral infections would bring the survival of natural forests into question. Malcolm Campbell of the Department of Plant Sciences at Oxford University is one of the world's leading researchers into lignin-reduced GM trees. He confirms the risks of "outcrossing" (the term that scientists use for trees in plantations crossing with forest trees). "Because most [plantation] trees have an abundance of wild or feral relatives, outcross, and display long-distance gene flow via pollen and sometimes seed, there is likely to be considerable activist and public concern about large-scale use of genetically engineered trees," he wrote in 2003. Campbell's and other forestry scientists' solution to outcrossing is another techno-fix. They are working on genetically engineering trees to prevent them flowering. However, this presents two further problems. If the trees are indeed sterile this means thousands of hectares of trees without flowers, pollen, nuts or seeds. No birds or insects could live in such a plantation and the biodiversity of the plantation would be even lower than in today's monoculture tree plantations. The second problem is that trees have very long lifespans. The only way of knowing that trees genetically engineered for sterility will remain sterile for their entire lifespan is by repeatedly conducting trials lasting the hundreds of years of a tree's lifespan. By focussing on lignin as the cause of pollution from pulp mills, Campbell and his colleagues can argue that reducing the amount of lignin in trees is a reasonable solution. They overlook other possible solutions such as using crops like hemp which have lower levels of lignin than trees. Rather than asking questions about the nature of the pulp and paper industry for which they are working, forest scientists are asking whether genetically modifying trees for reduced lignin will work. I asked Malcolm Campbell some questions about his work on genetically modifying the lignin content of trees. I asked him whether he had ever conducted any research into the impacts of large-scale industrial tree plantations on local communities in the South, and whether he had visited any local communities without representatives of the company responsible for managing the plantations. Campbell declined to answer. Instead, he invited me to visit his laboratory in Oxford, "so we can discuss the complexities of your questions at greater length". Since its invention in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, scientific forestry has been dedicated to meeting the needs of the timber industry. Simplified landscapes and vast monoculture tree plantations are a direct product of this science. In the process of simplification local communities' use of the landscape are ignored or violently suppressed. Genetic engineering of trees for reduced lignin is scientific forestry's latest offer to increase the profits of the pulp and paper industry. It will not provide benefits for communities living near the GM tree plantations. Rather than solving the problems of monoculture plantations, tinkering with genes to make trees more amenable to the pulp industry will only make things worse. By: Chris Lang, e-mail: chrislang@t-online.de
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