- Brazil: Plantations, profits and GM trees

Proponents of industrial tree plantations often argue that plantations can relieve pressure on forests. Brazil’s pulp and paper industry exposes this myth for the pro-industry propaganda that it is. Rather than growing more wood on less land, the industry grows more wood on more land. Every year the area of plantations increases and every year the area of forest decreases.

Take Brazil’s Aracruz Cellulose, for example, the world’s largest producer of bleached eucalyptus pulp. Aracruz’s three pulp mills produce a total of two million tons of pulp a year. The company’s eucalyptus plantations were established on the lands of the Tupinikim and Guarani indigenous peoples and other local communities. The eucalyptus trees that feed Aracruz’s pulp mills are among the fastest growing trees in the world. Yet Aracruz continues to expand both its pulp operations and the area of its plantations, pushing yet more people off the land.

Aracruz is also carrying out laboratory research into genetically modified trees. In 1998, Aracruz became the first company to receive permission from Brazil’s National Technical Commission of Biosecurity (CTNBio) for laboratory experiments on GM trees.

A year before receiving this application, which is still current, Aracruz produced a statement on GM trees. “Many sectors such as agriculture are using genetics, and there is no reason to impose a genetic prohibition on the forestry industry, which, for plantations, follow the same basic concepts as any food crop,” the company explained. To Aracruz, then, there is no difference between an annual food crop and trees which can live for hundreds of years.

Gabriel Dehon Rezende, Forest Improvement Manager at Aracruz told me in July 2004 that “the company believes that Genetic Engineering could help bring about sustainable social, environmental and economic benefits to agricultural and forestry activities in the future.” Rezende was quick to point out that at present “Aracruz does not use Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in its field trials or commercial plantations.”

Brazilian pulp and paper company Suzano owns more than 180,000 hectares of eucalyptus plantations in the states of Sao Paulo, Bahia, Espirito Santo, Minas Gerais and Maranhao. Last year, Suzano spent US$180 million on expanding its mills in Bahia and Sao Paulo and has plans to double its production capacity by 2008.

Each year, Suzano spends US$2 million on research and development. Suzano is financing research into GM eucalyptus at the Luiz de Queiroz Agricultural College. The research aims to engineer trees with reduced lignin and higher cellulose content, an attempt to find what Suzano describes as the “perfect tree”.

Suzano is also interested in producing a GM eucalyptus tree which can withstand drought. While the company acknowledges that “the water shortage already being experienced in some areas is a huge challenge”, it fails to mention that Suzano’s water guzzling eucalyptus plantations are one of the causes of the water shortage.

Suzano is among thirteen companies working with Brazil’s Ministry for Science and Technology on a project to map the eucalyptus genome. More than 50 scientists are involved in the “Genolyptus” project, which focuses particularly on the way genes affect wood formation and disease resistance. The project started in 2002 and is due to be completed in 2006.

International Paper, the world’s largest pulp and paper firm, has almost 200,000 hectares of industrial tree plantations in Brazil. Wood chips from Brazil are exported to International Paper’s mills in the US. Two years ago, International Paper of Brazil received permission from CTNBio for experiments with GM trees.

International Paper is a partner in ArborGen, the world’s largest GM tree company. ArborGen has plans to test its GM eucalyptus in Brazil. New Zealand biotech firm Horizon2 has a research contract with ArborGen. The company states that the research aims “to help improve the pulping characteristics of eucalyptus destined for the Brazilian market.”

In March 2004, Bruce Burton, the vice-president of Rubicon, a partner in ArborGen, announced that ArborGen would not carry out any GM tree trials in New Zealand. Instead, “we’ll carry on doing test in the US and Brazil” he said.

Aracruz, Suzano, International Paper and ArborGen are involved in research into GM trees because they believe they can make more money by doing so.

In April this year, the Movement of Landless Peasants protested against the pulp and paper industry’s take over of vast tracts of land in Brazil. Landless people occupied areas of industrial tree plantations owned by the pulp and paper companies Veracel, Suzano, Klabin, VCP, Aracruz and Trombini.

None of the companies hoping to plant GM trees in Brazil is doing so in order to relieve pressure on forests or to help resolve the land problem in Brazil. Their profits come at the expense of Brazil’s people and forests.

By: Chris Lang, e-mail: chrislang@t-online.de

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- Chile: Made-to-measure trees for the forestry industry

The Chilean forestry sector seems to accept no limits to the expansion of its monoculture pine and eucalyptus plantations. On the one hand it has turned to repression and lies to face local opposition. On the other, it has extended its operations to other countries, such as Argentina and Uruguay, where it has installed plantations, timber industries and pulp mills, thus increasing its impact on other environments and populations.

In addition to the above, it also does not accept the limits imposed by nature and is appealing to biotechnology to make trees with the right characteristics to be able to plant more and obtain greater benefits.

At the present time, Chile leads the development of the biotechnology sector in Latin America, and it may well become the first country to market transgenic trees on a world level and a platform from which to produce and export transgenic pines and technology to the Continent – a dangerous issue.

Although the process began earlier, it started to strengthen in 1999 with the establishment of GenFor as a joint venture between the Fundación Chile and the Canadian company Cellfor. The initial hub of interest regarding genetically modified tree production is to make pines resistant to the pine shoot moth (Rhyacionia buoliana) which is affecting wide areas of monoculture radiata pine plantations, covering one and a half million hectares in Chile. The company hopes to have these pines ready for commercial plantation by the year 2008.

To create this technology, Genfor has established an agreement with the Forest Research Institute (FRI), a research body of the New Zealand Government. The work at FRI is developed on the basis of genetic material from radiata pine, with different lines of selected embryos from Chile being reproduced, in which three proteins with high pesticide levels have been identified. This transgenic pine is obtained by incorporating a Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) gene, similar to the one used in transgenic crops such as maize and cotton.

At the same time, GenFor is also working on the genetic modification of radiata and loblolly pine to increase the level of cellulose and lessen the amount of lignin in the wood. The objective of such studies is to supply the industry with timber that contains a greater proportion of the required raw material (cellulose) and a smaller percentage of what has to be separated and discarded (lignin), thus considerably lowering production costs.

Furthermore, in 2001, the Foundation for Agrarian Innovation (Fundación para la Innovación Agraria –FIA) of the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture, signed an agreement with the International Redbio Foundation, becoming its representative branch in Chile. Its web page has a section on the subject of “Biotechnology in Chile” summarizing its vision of the issue. It states that “Chile has notoriously diversified its productive and export base over the past years. However, its economic development continues to be firmly based on exploitation and marketing of natural resources. In this context, biotechnology appears to be a very useful tool in the improvement of the competitive capacity of productive sectors.” Regarding the forestry sector, it mentions a project which “increases the cellulose content and reduces the lignin content of radiata pine,” adding that “other applications will make it possible to produce better quality trees that are more uniform and have better quality and yields.”

This is not all. According to an entrepreneurial vision, there are many hectares of land in Chile (they estimate at least half a million hectares) that are being “sub-utilized” because the trees used in plantations cannot resist the intense cold prevailing there. To solve this problem, the Forestry Institute (Instituto Forestal – INFOR) and a group of forestry companies are working in conventional genetic selection to produce clones of cold-resistant eucalyptus. According to INFOR “In the pre-cordillera Andes area there are soils that are extraordinarily well suited to the production of Eucalyptus globulus, but they are presently unavailable due to the limitation of the cold, a problem that could be solved with the results of this project.”

At the same time, the Universidad de la Frontera in the south of Chile is studying (with funding from the Fund for Scientific and Technological Development) the possible use of the genes of a small grass that survives in the Antarctic (Deschampsia antartica) to produce cold-resistant trees. Its particular tolerance to low temperatures has given rise to the interest in identifying the responsible gene or genes to apply them to eucalyptus and thus further increase the area to be planted with this species.

Beyond all the problems discussed in this bulletin, caused by the liberation of transgenic trees, all these technological “advances” choose to ignore what is evident: that the large-scale monoculture pine and eucalyptus plantations have caused serious social and environmental problems in Chile and it is more than evident that the plantation of transgenic trees will only make them even more serious.

Article based on information from: "La planta que mueve a la ciencia. UFRO lidera atractiva investigación de Deschampsia antártica". Eduardo Henríquez, Diario Austral, 8 June 2004 http://www.australtemuco.cl/prontus4_noticias/site/edic/2004_06_08_1/home/home.html Fundación Redbio: http://www.fundacionredbio.org/filichile.htm
"El futuro de la industria forestal...hoy". Bioplanet. Fundación Ciencia para la Vida
http://www.bioplanet.net/magazine/bio_enefeb_2000/bio_2000_enefeb_reportaje.htm
María Isabel Manzur.- "Investigación biotecnológica en Chile orientada a la producción de transgénicos". Santiago, Fundación Sociedades Sustentables, 2003

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- Kenya: Biotechnology, eucalyptus but no GM trees

Wangari Maathai and Florence Wambugu have dramatically opposing approaches to tree planting in Kenya. Maathai’s approach is anti-colonialist and empowers the people planting trees. Wambugu’s is neo-colonialist and makes the people planting trees dependent on biotechnology.

Wangari Maathai is this year’s Nobel Prize winner. Her Green Belt Movement trains women to set up their own tree nurseries. “We make them independent people who can take care of their environment by themselves,” says Maathai. As well as tree planting, Maathai is African Co-President of Jubilee 2000 and is campaigning for the cancellation of Third World Debt.

Florence Wambugu is the founder of A Harvest Biotechnology Foundation International. Until 2002, she was the director of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).

In 1997, ISAAA started a “Tree Biotechnology Project”. The project is a partnership between the Kenyan Forest Department, the Kenyan Forestry Research Institute and Mondi Forests, South Africa’s pulp and paper giant. Funding for the project comes from the UK’s Gatsby Foundation.

Mondi supplied hybrid clonal eucalyptus trees for the project, a cross between Eucalyptus grandis and Eucalyptus camaldulensis. The Tree Biotechnology Project planted the clonal trees in trial plots to see which grew best in Kenya’s soils and climate. The project set up a nursery at Karura, near Nairobi, which now produces more than one million tree cuttings a year to be delivered to farmers.

ISAAA is pro-genetic modification. “Commercialized GM crops continue to deliver significant economic, environmental, and social benefits to both small and large farmers in developing and industrial countries,” writes ISAAA’s chair Clive James. Florence Wambugu previously worked for Monsanto on a GM virus-resistant sweet potato project. ISAAA’s funders include Bayer CropScience, Monsanto, Syngenta, Pioneer Hi-Bred and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Past and present board members include representatives from Monsanto, Syngenta and the AusBiotech Alliance.

ISAAA’s statements about its tree planting project (as well as the word “Biotechnology” in the project’s title) hint at genetic modification. ISAAA states that Mondi’s “genetically superior Eucalyptus” grows faster and “the hybrid is drought- and cold-tolerant.” The project “aims to provide superior clonal material to both rural and urban communities in Kenya”.

In a July 2004 article, EcoTerra accused Florence Wambugu of using the project to import genetically modified trees from South Africa into Kenya. In the UK, the Guardian reported that “GM eucalyptus is to replace the country’s forest cover.”

ISAAA denies that the trees are genetically modified. “The project does not involve transgenic trees, it involves genetically enhanced trees, which are the result of traditional breeding programmes at Mondi Forests,” ISAAA’s Catherine Ngamau told me.

Peter Gardiner, Mondi Forests’ Natural Resource Manager denies that Mondi has ever produced GM trees. “We don’t deploy any GMO material in the research, on a research plot or commercially anywhere. We haven’t done it anywhere. There’s no intention to do that,” Gardiner told me.

Flic Blakeway was one of Mondi’s forestry scientists that Florence Wambugu met when she visited Mondi’s nurseries in South Africa. Blakeway co-authored a paper presented at the 1997 World Forestry Congress in Turkey, which describes how scientists in Mondi’s laboratories had started “preliminary work” on GM trees, including “the transformation of eucalyptus leaf and cell cultures using Agrobacterium mediated procedures.” Blakeway’s paper reported that the experiments did not produce any GM trees.

Although I’ve found no evidence to back EcoTerra’s claim that Mondi and Florence Wambugu have sneaked GM eucalyptus trees into Kenya, ISAAA’s Tree Biotechnology Project is not immune to problems.

Fast growing eucalyptus trees cause streams and ponds to dry up and the water table to drop in the areas they are planted. One of the Kikuyu names for eucalyptus is munyua maai, which means the “drinker of water”. Little or nothing will grow under the trees.

In 1995 in a presentation at the UN Women’s conference in Beijing, Wangari Maathai explained that during the colonial era, “species of trees like the eucalyptus, black wattle and conifer trees replaced indigenous species not only on farmlands but also in forest areas.” As a result, she continued, “farmlands have lost water and certain crops like bananas, sugarcanes and local species of arrow roots no longer thrive on the drier farmlands to give food security to the local communities.”

Then there’s the Blue Gum Chalcid, a tiny black insect which is threatening Kenya’s eucalyptus trees. Affected trees are useless for timber or poles. In November 2004, the Daily Nation reported that the pest could threaten up to 40 per cent of Kenya’s plantations. Eston Mutitu of the Kenya Forestry Research Institute commented that the worst affected trees are those produced though biotechnology such as through ISAAA’s project.

“We are now experiencing exotic pests attacking exotic trees. It seems we are getting the bad side of incorporating the exotic trees,” Mutitu told Biosafety News in April 2004.

Three years ago, at a conference in South Africa, Wangari Maathai said, “We are trying to stop the current government from expanding the plantations. The government sees indigenous forests as useless.” It seems that no one from the Kenyan government, ISAAA or Mondi was listening. Perhaps they will pay attention now that the problems caused by planting eucalyptus trees are becoming all too apparent.

By: Chris Lang, e-mail: chrislang@t-online.de