Plantations are not Forests Commercial Tree Plantations in the Mekong Region Vol. 9 No. 3 March - June 2004 Published by Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance (TERRA)

(Report) Plantations: The ‘Green Wastelands’ by Ricardo Carrere

From a conventional forestry definition, a “plantation” is not considered different from a “forest”.

Ricardo Carrere, a forester, shows how local communities recognise the fallacy of the forester’s definition and challenge it through using a variety of terms to describe commercial tree plantations and their destructive impacts on water, soil, biodiversity and local livelihoods.

How people perceive what foresters call “planted forests”

For mainstream foresters, tree plantations are almost synonymous to forests. The FAO’s year 2000 definition states that “forest includes natural forests and forest plantations”. Most foresters go even further and divide forests in two categories: “natural forests” and “planted forests”, which is even worse. Although this implies agreeing that forests and plantations have differences, it also implies that they are essentially the same: both are “forests”. This apparently simple issue has important implications, because it is used as a means of promoting large-scale tree monocultures, through what the forestry establishment defines as “reforestation” and “afforestation” activities which would increase “forest cover”, thus countering deforestation.

However, local people are much wiser than the FAO and mainstream foresters, because they have suffered the impacts of those so-called “planted forests”. For them the issue is much more simple – plantations are not forests – and it is interesting to see how they describe them in accordance with their experience and with their cultural and environmental background.

The selfish tree

In a country like Thailand, where agriculture is such an important activity, local people call eucalyptus “the selfish tree”, because it takes so many nutrients from the soil and allows for little intercropping. Combined with the fact that it lowers the water table – thus creating problems for rice growing in the dry season – and does not provide for any of the goods available in forests, it is no wonder that these plantations are perceived as enemies to be destroyed. I was deeply impressed when I visited some plantation areas in northern Thailand a few years ago and was approached by villagers saying: “You are a forester, so you must know; tell us how we can kill eucalyptus, because if we cut them they just keep coming back!”

Planted soldiers

Chile is a South American country where a democratically elected government was overthrown by a military coup in the early 1970s. A ruthless dictatorship ruled the country for almost two decades. During those years the military took over the indigenous Mapuche people’s territories in southern Chile and handed them over to plantation companies, which covered them with vast plantations of alien pine trees. It is thus not surprising that I have heard these plantations being described as “planted soldiers” because they are green, planted in straight rows and advancing! Local people hate them as much as they hated the military during the dictatorship they had to endure. That hatred even resulted in a strong discussion within the cooperative movement, because its international symbol is composed of two pine trees and people didn’t want to have pine trees as their symbol!

Green deserts

In many places monoculture tree plantations are defined as “deserts” (green deserts, deserts of trees, socioeconomic deserts). Such is the case of Brazil, where a broad group of people and organisations campaigning against eucalyptus plantations have created a network called “Movement Alert Against the Green Desert”. The word “desert” implies a lifeless environment and this is precisely what these plantations are: they provide no food to the local fauna, no space for the local flora and no goods or services to local people.

In a recent visit to a plantation area in Colombia, local peasants took me to a pine plantation and before getting there they told me: “Now you will know what silence means”. And they were of course right; not a single sound was to be heard; it was in fact a lifeless and silent desert.

However, defining plantations as “green deserts” has been rightly challenged by a person in South Africa – a country having large desert areas. This woman reacted saying that “‘green wastelands’ would be more apt than a comparison with deserts”, because “there is more biodiversity in a few square meters of the Namib desert than in an entire plantation.”

But regardless of whether it is or not correct to call them deserts, the following description of plantations made by a South African local landowner is enlightening: “billions of rows of thirsty pine, gum [eucalyptus] and wattle [acacia] masquerading as ‘forests’ which cast a sterile blanket over huge areas … to produce pulp, planks and poles for the profit of shareholders.”

Green cancer

South Africans have been quite inventive in providing definitions about plantations, the main reason being that the country has some two million hectares of monoculture tree plantations and almost the same area of land invaded by plantation trees (pines, eucalyptus and acacia). In this country, some people refer to plantations as “green cancer”, which provides a good image of how plantations spread and destroy water, soil, wildlife, plants and peoples’ livelihoods, eventually killing everything … as cancer does.

Worse than logging

In the Malaysian state of Sarawak, local people have for years been opposing logging concessions in their territories and have suffered the social and environmental impacts resulting from deforestation and forest degradation. I was therefore surprised when a person from Sarawak described eucalyptus and oil palm plantations as being “worse than logging.” His explanation couldn’t have been clearer. The person said: “logging companies come to our territories, cut the largest trees, take the logs out of the forest and leave. Plantation companies are worse. They come to our territories, cut the best trees, set the rest on fire, plant their own trees and stay!”

Plastic forests

During a recent meeting on plantations in the Mekong Region, I heard a Lao person call plantations “plastic forests.” No one present at the meeting asked for an explanation, because the similarity was so clear. It’s like plastic flowers and plants, which at a distance may look like the real thing, but it becomes obvious that they are not once one approaches them. Plantations are the same. They look like forests because they contain trees, but once inside it becomes clear that they have nothing else in common with true forests. However, the difference between plastic flowers and plastic forests is that while the producers of the former don’t pretend that they are real, those of the latter do, thus misleading the public.

Dead forests

However accurate all the above conceptual definitions of plantations are, my preference goes to one I learned from an indigenous Tupinikim person in Brazil. The man said: “Plantations are dead forests that kill everything.” This definition includes most of the above concepts. The first part is that they are “dead forests”: lifeless, silent, plastic, deserts. But that is complemented with the fact that they “kill everything”: selfish, military, worse than logging, cancer.

The real thing

Also in Thailand, a few years ago I had the fortune of being invited to visit a community forest in an area that had been previously planted with eucalyptus. When I got there, at first I couldn’t see the forest. The area was covered with sparsely growing trees (mostly sprouts and no higher than three metres), shrubs and grasses. The villagers gave me one of the best possible lectures I ever heard about forests. They went around showing me that this vine had “come back” and that they used it for medicinal purposes. That these ants had “come back” and that they were part of their diet. That the grass for their cattle was again growing in the forest and so were vegetables, fruits and so on. They never said a word about the trees, whose main function was obviously to allow these other useful things to “come back”. Regardless of what the percentage of “crown cover” was, of the tree composition of the forest, of what the height and diameter of the trees was, the former eucalyptus plantation had again become a forest. A pity the FAO definition people weren’t there. They could have learnt a lot.

* Ricardo Carrere is International Coordinator of the World Rainforest Movement (www.wrm.org.uy). He is co-author (with Larry Lohmann) of "Pulping the South: Industrial tree plantations and the world paper economy."