UNFF
and monoculture tree plantations
New York, May 2005
The member organizations of
the Latin American Network against Monoculture Tree Plantations
consider it necessary to reiterate to the United Nations Forum on
Forests (UNFF) their concern over the meagre results obtained 10
years after this process was launched. Not only has the objective
enounced since the beginning of preparing coherent policies to promote
“the management, conservation and sustainable development
of all types of forests” not been achieved, but monoculture
tree plantations have been promoted, worsening the situation of
the peoples who live in the forests and who depend on them.
Both the UNFF and the processes
preceding it (IPF and IFF) have enabled many Latin American governments
to hide the real rates of deforestation, appealing to the false
concept of “forest cover” which includes forests and
monoculture tree plantations as if all were forests. At the same
time they have legitimized the substitution of the grassland ecosystem
by monoculture tree plantations, including these plantations as
“planted forests” and thus increasing the area of “forests”
in countries such as Uruguay and regions of Argentina and Brazil.
In practically all the countries
of the region there is evidence of increasing support by governments
and bilateral and multilateral agencies to the promotion of monoculture
tree plantations, backed by the endorsement of UNFF. From Mexico
to the south of Chile, from the Atlantic coast of Brazil to the
Pacific coast in Ecuador, a two-fold process is manifest: the advancing
deforestation and the occupation of vast territories by monoculture
tree plantations.
As we stated in this same forum
two years ago, the experience accumulated on large-scale monoculture
tree plantations clearly shows their social, environmental and economic
impacts and therefore it is astonishing that UNFF should persist
in their promotion, while little or nothing can be shown to witness
the fulfilment of its express mandate, that of forest conservation.
It is clear that this model
of monoculture tree plantations serves the interests of the great
international pulp and paper industry and the timber industry, supplying
abundant amounts of homogeneous and cheap raw material to promote
the increasing consumption of their products. However, this is not
UNFF’s mandate. It also increasingly serves the countries
of the North, providing them with cheap carbon credits through the
establishment of the so-called “carbon sinks.” But this
is not UNFF’s mandate either.
UNFF cannot continue to close
its eyes to reality. The monoculture tree plantations that it promotes
as “planted forests” are destroying forests, grasslands
and wetlands, they are depleting the water, building food deserts
for the local fauna and occupying the place of native flora, evicting
people from their rural environment, depriving them of their means
of survival, resulting in a negative net balance regarding jobs
on a local level, and the scant and poorly paid ones they do generate,
in many cases are close to semi-slavery. Summing up, these monoculture
tree plantations are detrimental both to the environment and to
the local societies.
For all these reasons, it seems
necessary to us to reiterate that the function of UNFF is to elaborate
coherent policies to “promote the management, conservation
and sustainable development of all types of forests,” and
that monoculture tree plantations can in no way be considered as
a “type of forest.” If this forum cannot have a positive
influence on the conservation of the world’s real forest ecosystems,
then its very existence becomes meaningless.
