• Monocultures: The symbol of an outdated model
• Brazil: The “development” brought by a pulp mill
• Uruguay: To continue celebrating without pulp mills

 

- Monocultures: The symbol of an outdated model

If there is one thing that the other possible world we are appealing for must contain, it is biological diversity. Life shouts this out at us at each step we take. The message is there for all to see. The greater the diversity of an ecosystem, the greater its wealth, the greater its beauty. The precious tropical forests, deep receptacles of innumerable animal and plant species, of colours, shades and sounds, the cradle of springs and streams, the matrix of human populations. They are valuable to human beings, both aesthetically and functionally, supplying food, shelter, building materials, ornaments, tools. The idea is not that they must not be used, but that they must be used prudently, supportively and respectfully, “sustainably” to say it in a modern way.

Only present modernity that has broken all links with the natural world can have forgotten the lesson. Accelerated technological development and the development of communications have been the links that have enabled gigantic economic and financial groups to take nature by assault and try to take over the world, this time in an overwhelming way.

The rationale of these companies of achieving increasingly greater profits, makes them recreate the world to reach their goal in a more efficient way. Thus we find the paradigm of scale --large scale-- and within it, monocultures ferociously shown in agriculture, separating it dramatically from nature.

Monoculture tree plantations are one of its expressions. The interests that impose them want to disguise them as forests, but they are as far from being forests as they are from being prairies. So much so that they destroy both ecosystems.

Millions of hectares all over the world --in some cases previously occupied by forests and in others by prairies-- are planted with unending, uniform lines of eucalyptus trees destined to be reduced to pulp, to produce millions of tons of paper feeding wasteful consumption, mainly in packaging and advertising. The highest rates of consumption are, of course, in the countries of the North.

Lately attempts have been made to give to commercial monoculture eucalyptus plantations another purpose: that of “carbon sinks” or carbon garbage dumps. The Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change has provided a mechanism that is supposed to compensate for carbon dioxide releases, responsible for the greenhouse effect and its serious consequences on climatic change. This implies planting trees to trap carbon while they grow. As eucalyptus trees grow fast, it is assumed that they are ideal –of course as long as they do not catch fire, or rot, or are covered by floods, because this would return to the atmosphere all the carbon they have trapped. Greenhouse gas emitters plant trees and thus, by planting and planting, they can continue releasing and releasing carbon. This has given rise to another big business, the carbon market. What about the climate? Very bad, thank you. What about the soil, the flora and the fauna and the ecosystems, the various forms of livelihood? Very bad, thank you.

Plantations of oil palm are spreading more and more in the countries of the South due to their profitability resulting from combining cheap labour, low-cost land, abundant support from the World Bank, the IMF and UNDP, the short period between planting and starting to harvest, and a market on the rise in the countries of the North. Colonization, social inequity, the dismantling of States, are all fertile fields to do big business with the plantations. The rich nature of the South is violated time and time again.

And, like the icing on the cake, the latest novelty in tree plantations is that of transgenic trees. Strengthening the genetic selection process for commercial ends, centred on certain genetic features of trees, such as rapid growth, height, diameter, the quality of the timber, and straight trunks with few branches, genetic engineering now produces genetically modified trees (transgenic trees) to adapt them even more to the needs of the forestry industry. This at the cost of the serious danger the process involves. If the rate of tree growth is stepped up, water will be depleted faster and destruction of biodiversity will be accelerated, giving way to biological deserts full of transgenic trees resistant to insects, with no flowers, fruit or seeds. The soil will be destroyed at an even faster rate because of the increased extraction of biomass, intensive mechanization and a greater use of agrochemicals.

All these different types of plantations have in common the problems they cause: they encroach on ancestral territorial rights and on the use of the natural assets of indigenous and peasant communities, they cause soil erosion, alter the water cycle, eliminate other ecosystems and other forms of production and reduce biodiversity.

In sum, monocultures --of trees, plants or of the mind-- symbolize an outdated model that must be substituted by biological and cultural diversity to make that other world we aspire to, possible.

By Raquel Núñez, World Rainforest Movement (WRM), e-mail: raquelnu@wrm.org.uy

---

top

- Brazil: The “development” brought by a pulp mill

In 1972 the Norwegian group Borregaard set up a pulp mill in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, a few kilometres away from the City of Porto Alegre, (municipality of Guaiba), on the banks of the river Guaiba. This mill was to close down in 1975 as a result of public pressure against the contamination it was causing. That same year it was purchased by the Klabin Company, and reopened under the name of Riocell.

The mill used elemental chlorine to bleach the pulp, generating considerable contamination of the Guaiba River that supplied drinking water to the city of Porto Alegre. However, the State was obliged to carry out works to decontaminate the river basin with public funds obtained through an IDB loan of 170 million dollars.

In 2002, the company changed the method used to bleach the pulp and started using the Elemental Chlorine Free (ECF) process (see WRM Bulletin No. 83). The following year, 2003, Riocell was purchased by Aracruz Celulose S.A. The mill produces bleached pulp for export and is supplied with raw material from the 40 thousand hectare plantations of eucalyptus it possesses in a range of 85 kilometres round the installations, which Aracruz also acquired when it purchased the mill.

Aracruz Celulose S.A. is also the owner, in the State of Espirito Santo, of the largest bleached eucalyptus pulp mill in the world, with a capacity to produce 2 million tons annually. The enterprise was established encroaching on the rights of the local Tupinikim and Guarani indigenous peoples as it occupies the ancestral lands of these communities. Since then they have been waging a long struggle against the company (see WRM Bulletin No. 13).

In 2004, the company made major investments in Rio Grande do Sul in the Unidad Guaiba (ex Riocell) mill to revamp it. While opening new and large facilities at the end of July, the company launched a forestry programme in the State of Rio Grande do Sul to step up the eucalyptus plantations. Presently the mill is able to produce 400,000 tons of bleached pulp per year.

In the framework of the World Social Forum, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) organized a visit to the mill in order to investigate on site the impacts it has had at the local level.

A group of 27 representatives of various organizations from some ten countries from all over the world took part in this experience, deploying themselves in the area surrounding the mill, where they talked to the neighbours and visited the location to check conditions.

At the end, the participants shared both the testimonies they received and their own impressions. The unanimous opinion was that the situation around the mill --formerly a picturesque resort known as “Alegria” (Joy)-- is now deplorable: the general impression is certainly not that of a village of outstanding prosperity, the surroundings of the mill are dusty and the coast is an oily and abandoned mire bordering murky waters which, near the mill, are hot. According to the neighbours, dead fish may be seen floating in the waters.

From the interviews with the neighbours it appears that they are obliged to live in the midst of persistent noise 24 hours a day from the constant traffic of trucks that alters their sleeping habits and in some cases, ends in nervous disorders. They must also put up with a strong bad smell that has even damaged their social relationship with people from other areas who are not used to it. The high rate of allergies --especially among children-- mainly affecting the respiratory system was also pointed out.

Regarding employment, they stated that when the mill was built and also when some extension works were carried out, employment rose. However most of the labour was brought in from the Brazilian northeast and once the building was finished, direct jobs ceased and outsourced jobs dropped. The mill is only good for those who have jobs there, they say, and these are not many. The social differences are big. Furthermore, artisan fishing --an important source of local labour-- has been seriously damaged as the fish started to taste bad and people stopped buying it. The fisher-people now have to go much further away, near the sea, to seek their prey.

Another of the effects they reported was a permanent fall of a white powder that mainly damages vehicles.

Obviously the presence of visitors was noticed by the company, which is surrounded by a high wire-netting fence. Very soon a van with security guards started to circulate very slowly, stopping from time to time to stare at the visitors directly and inquisitively, who were spread out in groups, talking here and there with the people of the neighbourhood.

Some neighbours remembered enjoying the place when it was a beautiful resort with clear water visited by small boats full of people from the neighbouring city of Porto Alegre. Later, with the paper mill, “development” disembarked. Empty promises were made, leaving them full of smoke, powder, noise and smell. Scant jobs. Certainly there will be many people who now have “saudades” (nostalgia) for the old Alegria (Joy).

By Raquel Núñez, World Rainforest Movement (WRM), e-mail: raquelnu@wrm.org.uy

---

top

- Uruguay: To continue celebrating without pulp mills

Consumerism and poverty are the two extremes of the current world paper market. Manipulation of markets, cartel agreements, establishment of prices and other similar practices give a group of companies the necessary power to control it. In between are pollution of air, water and soil, land accumulation and appropriation by foreign companies, scale increases and strengthening of a form of production requiring fewer and fewer workers. A chain of unsustainable actions in this line --a replication of others-- that sets aside any sensitivity and prudence towards nature and the present and coming generations. Social equity is not in the sights of these enterprises.

Since 1989 the Uruguayan State has become indebted with the World Bank to support a forestry model exporting eucalyptus logs for pulp. It did so with the concession of tax exemptions, partial refund of plantation costs, soft credits, construction of highway facilities, equal benefits for foreign investment, among others. As a result, Uruguayan society made a contribution of approximately 400 million dollars to the plantation sector.

However, tree plantations did not bring with them the promised jobs. They contributed to rural emigration insofar as they generated fewer permanent jobs than extensive cattle-raising, while doing so at the cost of jobs lost in the activities they substituted, with equal or less quality of working conditions and lower salaries.

Nevertheless, all these considerations do not appear in the companies’ book-keeping or in the book-keeping of the international financial institutions or of the governments responding to their instructions. They only discuss in the language of orthodox economy and “global demand” and not in the language of small rural farmers, of workers or of politics. The result was that tree planting went on.

In addition to destroying prairies and the few remnants of indigenous forests in the hilly area, large scale tree plantations increased concentration of land tenure and foreign ownership of land. In the 1960s, there was a strong public demand for agrarian reform. At that time, the greatest landholdings in private hands were of about 30,000 hectares. Today, the US based forestry company Weyerhaeuser concentrates some 150,000 hectares of land. There are also Canadian and Chilean capitals that have purchased thousands of hectares for tree plantations. EUFORES, belonging to the Spanish ENCE group has some 50,000 hectares planted with eucalyptus aimed at pulp production. The Forestal Oriental Company (FOSA), belonging to the Finnish capitals of Botnia and UPM/Kymmene, owns some 100,000 hectares, of which 60,000 are declared as intended for tree plantations.

In 2003 the two latter companies submitted projects for the installation of two mills to produce bleached pulp from eucalyptus, a few kilometres away from the city of Fray Bentos and the “Las Cañas” tourist resort. ENCE plans to install a mill with the capacity to produce 500,000 tons per year and Botnia a mill with the capacity to produce one million tons per year.

Resistance to these mega-enterprises has been increasing (see WRM bulletins nos. 12, 54, 75 and 83) involving not only Uruguay but also the neighbouring Argentine province of Entre Rios, which would be affected by the impacts of both mills.

Members of Guayubira --one of the Uruguayan groups that has strongly questioned the installation of the pulp mills-- attending the Fifth World Social Forum in Puerto Alegre, Brazil, took the initiative of addressing an open letter to Dr. Tabare Vazquez, the incoming President of Uruguay, who will take up office on 1 March, to express their concern over the possible installation of these two pulp mills.

This letter sets out that:

“The World Social Forum is a space giving a voice to the hopes for change in humanity. It states that ‘Another World is Possible’ because the present one, where exploitation, social exclusion and environmental destruction predominate, has shown itself to be unsustainable.

The present model of large-scale monoculture tree plantations that has been imposed in the country has only made a few people rich with everybody’s money. It has deepened social exclusion, concentration and foreign ownership of land and environmental degradation.

And now, to complete this neo-liberal project, the out-going government has promoted the installation of two gigantic pulp mills close to the city of Fray Bentos on the Uruguay River.

The installation of the mills would not only consolidate the existing forestry model but would also increase the area planted to supply them, thus exacerbating already existing impacts.

Pulp mills not only cause environmental pollution but also displace local sources of labour in the agriculture and cattle-raising, tourism and fishing sectors, and would also have impacts on the health of the local Uruguayan and Argentine population.

The outgoing government has already authorized the installation of one of the mills and we see with concern that they are establishing all the conditions to hurriedly approve the second mill.

From Porto Alegre, Uruguayans and Argentines –many of them representatives of social organizations– present at the World Social Forum earnestly appeal to you, before taking a resolution on the pulp mills, to make a comprehensive analysis of the serious impacts they involve.

We consider that it would be advisable, making use of your authority as incoming president, for you appeal to the out-going government to halt any decision authorizing the installation of the second mill.

Those who voted for you did so with the conviction that another Uruguay IS possible and we are convinced that if these mills are installed, they will only enhance the previous model.”

This open letter, containing words pronounced by Vazquez when his electoral triumph was confirmed (“Celebrate Uruguayan women, celebrate Uruguayan men”) ends by saying: “For this reason we ask you to allow the Uruguayans who endorsed the change to continue celebrating.”

Hundreds of Uruguayans and Argentines present at the WSF, many of them representatives of social, trade-union, environmental, political and religious organizations signed the letter which was endorsed by outstanding figures, such as the Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, the Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner, Adolfo Perez Esquivel and the fighter for Human Rights and member of the Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Hebe Bonafini, among others.

Participants of other nationalities also adhered to the letter, “moved by the shared vision that another world is possible,” expressing that “We trust that (Dr. Tabare Vazquez) will honour the expectations that Uruguayan men and women have built over various years of struggles and that have now been deposited in you.”

The complete text of the letter and the list of signatures and adhesions can be viewed at the Grupo Guayubira’s website: http://www.chasque.net/guayubira/celulosa/carta.html where those who wish to adhere to the letter are invited to do so by filling in the form that is attached there.

By Raquel Núñez, World Rainforest Movement (WRM), e-mail: raquelnu@wrm.org.uy