Pulping the South:
Industrial Tree Plantations in the World Paper Economy
Ricardo Carrere and Larry Lohmann

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Chapter 1

Introduction

To millions of people across the world today, the pulp and paper industry is a growing problem. The chipping of native forests to provide raw material for the industry is being opposed bitterly by local people and environ-mentalists from Australia to Finland, and from Chile to Canada (WALHI and YLBHI 1992, Hamilton 1995, PRS 1994, MacIsaac and Champagne 1994, WCWC 1994, Olsson 1995). No less widespread are protests at pollution from giant pulp mills which has sucked oxygen from rivers, ruined fisheries and drinking water supplies, and increased the burden of highly-toxic chlorinated organic compounds in animal and human bodies (BP 12.7.95, EBY 13.3, Greenpeace International 1994).

This book is concerned with a third activity of the pulp and paper industry _ one which is often less well-publicized and which, at first glance, might seem more benign: planting trees. To help feed pulp and paper mills, vast monocultures of conifers, eucalyptus, acacia, and other species are being established both in the North and, increasingly, in the South, where fast tree growth, inexpensive land and labour, and lavish subsidies combine to make wood especially cheap. As swatches of exotic trees invade native woodlands, grasslands, farmlands and pastures, the results, in country after country, have been impoverishment, environmental degradation, and rural strife.

In documenting the often-hidden record of industrial pulpwood plantations in the South and what lies behind them, this book hopes to contribute to new ways of thinking about one of the world's most important industries as it undergoes rapid globalization.

Commercial plantations and forests

Plantations, like forests, are full of trees. But the two are usually radically different. A forest is a complex, self-regenerating system, encompassing soil, water, microclimate, energy, and a wide variety of plants and animals in mutual relation. A commercial plantation, on the other hand, is a cultivated area whose species and structure have been simplified dramatically to produce only a few goods, whether lumber, fuel, resin, oil, or fruit. A plantation's trees, unlike those of a forest, tend to be of a small range of species and ages, and to require extensive and continuing human intervention.

The distinction, of course, is not always hard and fast. A 'native forest' where economically unimportant species have been eliminated may wind up as simplified, and as in need of constant human maintenance to stay that way, as any plantation. Much of Europe's 'forest' falls into this category. On the other hand, some diverse, seemingly 'natural' forests either began their existence as plantations, having then been abandoned, or continue to be carefully 'cultivated' by local people, as is the case in areas inhabited by the Kayapo in Brazil (Posey 1985, 1990).

The industrial monocrops with which this book is concerned, however, have a much less ambiguous status. Resulting from an aggressive and thoroughgoing transformation of a landscape, they are much closer to an industrial agricultural crop than to either a forest as usually understood or a traditional agricultural field. Usually consisting of thousands or even millions of trees of the same species, bred for rapid growth, uniformity and high yield of raw material and planted in even-aged stands, they require intensive preparation of the soil, fertilisation, planting with regular spacing, selection of seedlings, weeding using machines or herbicides, use of pesticides, thinning, mechanised harvesting, and in some cases pruning. Such plantations may be established either on large parcels of land owned or rented by a company or on a large collection of smallholdings.

Even many 'non-industrial' plantations are today being established on this industrial model. In some places, for instance, large-scale rapid-growth monocrops are being grown on the false assumption that they can 'protect' water catchment areas or soils in the way a native forest would. Other extensive monocrops, often of exotic species, are being established with the stated purpose of providing fuelwood to local people. Industrial-type plantations are also being promoted as a way of absorbing emissions of carbon dioxide which lead to global warming: companies or countries are held to have 'compensated' for their heavy CO2 emissions in one place if they plant swatches of fast-growing trees in another. This use of industrial-friendly trees in plantations promoted for purposes other than wood harvesting can have important impacts on industrial wood prices. 

In contrast to such plantations _ which are organized to be highly responsive to one or two demands of large-scale manufacturing concerns or other powerful centralizing actors _ are attempts to plant trees in ways responsive to a wide variety of interlocked local concerns. In some agroforestry systems, for example, a diversity of trees are chosen and planted to provide protection, shade and food for livestock, fruit and wood for humans, and protection, nutrients and water for crops, thus helping to keep production diverse and in harmony with local landscapes and needs (Groome 1991, Shiva and Bandyopadhyay 1987, Shiva 1991b).

Another useful contrast to the industrial plantation model with which this book is concerned is offered by efforts to restore degraded forests or woodlands by planting trees of some or all of the original species. Here the objective is not to produce large quantities of whatever wood is suitable for industrial markets, but to restore diverse ecosystems using native species. Thus a eucalyptus tree, when planted in one of its native regions in Australia as a way of helping to regenerate an earlier ecosystem in ways approved by local people, may be considered to be a contribution to reforestation. The same tree, when planted as part of a large-scale pulpwood monocrop in India or Uruguay, is not only not a contribution to 'reforestation', but is likely to contribute to environmental degradation and social problems. Planting a tree, whether native or exotic, is in itself neither a positive or a negative process. It is the social and geographical structures within which that tree is planted which make it one or the other.

The advent of large-scale monocultures

Historically, tree plantations have most commonly consisted of fruit-bearing species such as olives, figs, date palms, and apples, as well as a wide variety of trees cultivated for fodder, shelter, medicine and resin, or for aesthetic or religious reasons. Although teak and eucalyptus began to be grown in Asia, Africa and Latin America in the 19th century, extensive plantations of trees suitable for industry are mainly a 20th-century phenomenon, having generally been established as a result of overexploitation of native forests for wood. Such plantations are expanding now as never before, nowhere more quickly than in the South. Between 1965 and 1980, tree plantation area in the tropics tripled (Evans 1991), and between 1980 and 1990 increased again between two and three times (Pandey 1992, World Bank 1994, Evans 1991).

Although plantations are promoted for a variety of reasons _ to hold back desertification, to feed sawmills, to provide fuelwood, to diversify agricultural production _ the trees most often planted today are fast-growing species favoured by industry for paper pulp or other low-grade wood products. In 1980, tropical plantations were estimated to consist of over 70 per cent eucalyptus and pines (see Table 1.1) (Evans 1991), and the proportion is almost certainly even higher today. Pine and eucalyptus are also widespread in the non-tropical regions of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, China, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the southern United States, Spain, and Portugal. It is often the case that only one species will dominate a particular country's fast-growing tree plantations _ for example, Pinus radiata in Chile and New Zealand, Eucalyptus grandis in Uruguay and Brazil, and E. camaldulensis in Thailand.

TABLE 1
Species used in tropical tree plantations

table under construction

Source: Bazett 1993

Plantation extent

Due to different reporting methods and shortages of data, no reliable estimates exist of the global extent of tree plantations. Table 1.2 attempts to suggest the rough extent of tree plantations in tropical countries in 1990 by comparing the figures contained in two serious studies, those of Evans (1991) and Pandey (1992). Included are country estimates by Pandey of the extent of plantations of species often used for pulpwood. Evans calculates that tropical tree plantations covered 42.7 million hectares in 1990 and Pandey 43.9 million hectares by the end of that year. The World Bank's (1994) estimate for 1990, meanwhile, is 37.5 million hectares.

Michael D. Bazett's estimate that specifically industrial plantations occupy 99.3 million hectares in both tropical and non-tropical regions is contained in Table 1.3. Table 1.4, finally, presents Bazett's rough figures for fast-growing industrial plantations _ those yielding 12 cubic metres or more per year per hectare _ in the late 1980s. According to two sources, over 19 million hectares of fast-growing pine plantations and over six million hectares of eucalyptus are currently in existence (Bazett 1993, Wilson 1991); another claims that eucalyptus plantations total more than ten million hectares and acacia plantations 3.4 million hectares (Hagler 1995).While, according to Bazett, fast-growing plantations amount to only about a quarter of the total industrial plantation area, their importance to global wood supply, particularly pulpwood supply, is out of proportion to their size.

TABLE 1.2
Area covered by tree plantations in the tropics, 1990, thousand ha, selected countries

table under construction

TABLE 1.3
Area under industrial plantations (million ha)

table under construction

Source: Bazett 1993

Planting is expected to continue at a high rate. According to the World Bank (1994), an area of 10 to 12 million hectares is planted annually, half in China, although how much of this survives is unclear. India's eighth Five-Year Plan called for 17 million hectares of plantations, and Brazil has set out a programme for 12 million hectares of plantation by the year 2000. In Indonesia, some industrialists expect three to 4.6 million hectares of land to be under short-rotation pulpwood plantations by the year 2003 (Bazett 1993, Soetikno 1992), while Thai officials envisage over four million hectares being put under private-sector plantations by 2020. Ethiopia, meanwhile, has mooted plans to plant as much as 3.5 million hectares by 2000, Malaysia 500,000, and Burundi 300,000 (Evans 1991).

Plantation imperialism

The small range of genuses and species used in industrial plantations, as well as the nearly identical forestry development plans by which they are promoted, reflect a long-established and deeply-rooted forestry imperialism. By and large, plans for large-scale plantations do not arise in answer to the diversity of local needs. Nor, as this book attempts to show, do they often meet those needs. Rather, they function in a way which responds disproportionately to the needs of a Northern-dominated industrial economy while also serving bureaucratic ends.

TABLE 1.4
Area of fast-growing plantations at the end of the 1980s (thousands ha)

table under construction

Source: Bazett 1993

Most native forests in the US, Japan and Europe were destroyed long ago and replaced by agriculture, pasture or tree plantations (Westoby 1989). While industrial wood remains physically available in all three regions, access to that wood is often blocked for economic or political reasons. In the South, meanwhile, forests are disappearing at a dizzying rate due to complex causes in which Northern imperialism is deeply implicated (Myers 1989, Colchester and Lohmann 1993, Vandermeer and Perfecto 1995). For dominant Northern interests and their allies among Southern elites, the threats created by deforestation are threefold: shortages of the industrial timber needed to support indefinitely-increasing rates of per capita consumption; loss of other resources, including genetic materials, entailed by tropical deforestation; and loss of climatic stability due to rising levels of carbon dioxide. 

Large-scale monoculture plantations are one way of responding to these crises of the prevailing economic model without addressing their underlying causes. They promise, for example, a way of meeting largely-Northern timber demand while putting off the question of how to stabilize or reduce that demand. Hence such statements as 'the predicted gap between wood demand and supply in many regions is so huge that only plantations will fill it quickly enough' (Bass 1992). Such views are descendants of others prevalent in early 19th-century England, when depletion of domestic oak forests led to teak logging and teak plantations in Asia.

Industrial plantation programmes promise, as well, in the words of a study done for Shell International, to 'counter the greenhouse effect, either by serving as carbon sinks, or by alleviating pressure on native forests, helping to preserve them as carbon depots' (Shell/WWF 1993). As Chapter 6 indicates, this promise is false in both particulars. Nevertheless, it has enough superficial plausibility to distract uninformed audiences from the more interesting topic of how to find alternatives to a system whose logic dictates a never-ending spiral in which ever-greater carbon emissions necessitate an ever more desperate search for carbon sinks.

Accompanying the rise of industrial plantations _ and of radically simplified forests _ has been the development of a modern forestry science which functions in a way which adds to their credibility. This science, silviculture, arose in the North mainly as a consequence of industrial development, with its huge needs for timber and agricultural raw materials. The resultant deforestation forced industrializing countries fairly early on into finding new ways of managing forests and reestablishing woodlands.

The new forestry science separated forest management strictly from agriculture, and focused almost exclusively on production of uniform quantities and qualities of timber. The multiple functions of native forests and diverse community woodlands were reconceptualized as symptoms of 'untidiness', 'disorder', and 'weediness'. Non-wood uses of forests were recast as 'minor products'. Trees whose growth rates had ceased in economic terms to justify their continued existence were dismissed as 'overmature'. Flora and fauna which lacked market value, or which reduced timber output, were classified as 'unproductive' and became candidates for eradication. Forests were to be replaced by a factory-like 'order' of stands of single varieties of commercially-valuable trees, of which plantations became the best examples. Seeds, plants, nutrients, growth rates and dates of harvest all became candidates for human control. Negative social and environmental consequences were played down as problems which could be 'mitigated'.

The problems modern forestry science sets and solves, in short, are those thrown up by a politics of centralized control of land aimed at extracting a very few types of raw material in industrial quantities. Working exclusively within mainstream forestry science means not asking questions about, and thus tacitly supporting, that politics. Forestry science is thus not a 'neutral tool' which can be detached from its social surroundings and adapted to any political purpose. It comes complete with a strong set of political biases, no less when it is practiced in a professional manner than when it is not. To appeal to it alone for an answer to the question of whether any particular industrial plantation is an appropriate use of land is therefore to guarantee social as well as intellectual conflict.

About this book

This book, too, is not a 'neutral tool'. (No such tools exist.) Unlike most forestry science and mainstream economics, however, it strives to be self-aware and straightforward about its origins, orientation, and audience. Growing out of a widespread concern over the expansion of pulpwood plantations in the South, it attempts to organize the information and analyses it draws on in a way which will be of practical interest to those who are alarmed at plantations' deleterious and anti-democratic effects and who are seeking alternatives.

Thus Chapter 2, which sketches the political dynamics associated with a particularly large-scale, capital-intensive, cyclic industry, attempts to shed light on several questions often suppressed in mainstream discussions of pulp and paper. For example, why did destructive, extensive, highly-centralized plantations arise in the first place? Why do these plantations grow wood? And what are some of the dynamics lying behind rocketing per capita paper demand? In attempting to account for the recent shift toward monoculture plantations in the South, Chapter 3 goes on to look at the pulp and paper industry's tendency toward increased centralization and globalization. The social and environmental consequences of large-scale industrial plantations are then spelled out in Chapter 4.

Chapters 5 and 6 move to the topic of how, in practical political terms, these plantations are becoming a reality. Describing the different players who promote plantations (Northern and Southern governments, multilateral and bilateral development agencies, Southern elites, transnational paper corporations, banks, machinery suppliers, consul-tancies, academics, and even NGOs), Chapter 5 probes the mechanisms by which, working in loose alliance, they reorganize landscapes, capture subsidies, and otherwise reshape social environments in ways friendly to themselves. Chapter 6 is devoted to investigating another aspect of the industry's expansion often neglected in economistically-oriented studies of corporate strategy: techniques for managing opposition.

The case studies of Part Two concentrate on the Southern countries which, so far, have had the most prominent roles in the international trade in plantation wood fibre _ Brazil (Chapter 7), Chile (Chapter 8), South Africa (Chapter 10) and Indonesia (Chapter 11). For contrast, the experience of two other countries with plantations is also examined. These are Uruguay (Chapter 9), where plantations degrade not forest, but sparsely-populated grasslands, and from which, astonishingly, plantation wood is being exported to the naturally heavily-forested Nordic region; and Thailand (Chapter 12), where popular rural resistance to plantations established in thickly-inhabited areas has been persistent and often effective in challenging industrial plantations' spread.

Chapter 13, finally, sketches a few of the many constructive ways forward being adopted by movements concerned with the spread of plantations. These include coordinated critiques of the enormous public handouts which make the plantation boom possible and which help it further redistribute wealth and security from poor to rich in an increasingly skewed world system; exposure of the political maneuverings of various industry alliances; serious approaches to the issue of demand creation; and promotion of alternative-fibre use in decentralized, less energy-intensive systems.

Looking beyond this book

It is important to emphasize, in closing, that the handful of wood-fibre exporters to which this book confines its examination are not the only, or even necessarily the most severely-affected, of the Southern countries undergoing a plantation boom. A more complete survey would have to examine the experience of a whole range of other nations.

India, for example, although not a significant exporter, has had an exceptionally long, extensive and painful encounter with pulpwood plantations. Following the nation's independence in 1947, the price of raw materials for paper was so heavily subsidized that the industry's profitability remained high even as selectively-logged forest stocks were depleted. In the 1950s, some mills were provided with bamboo at a cost of one rupee per tonne when the prevailing market price was over Rs 2000 per tonne. The explosive growth in capacity which this support enabled made the paper and rayon industry even hungrier for raw materials. Prodded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), India's forest department consequently authorized clearfelling of large tracts of natural forest which, with the help of more subsidies, were then replanted with eucalyptus, pine, and other monocultures. A wider range of species and ages of native trees over greater and greater geographical areas also began to be put to the blade, with previously-protected watershed areas being redesignated as selective-cutting and then as clearfelling/plantation areas.

Biological and social problems resulted which are now familiar in countries across the world. In Karnataka and Kerala, harvests from so-called fast-growing plantations were only 10-43 per cent of forest department predictions. Eucalyptus plantations in an area of the Western Ghats on which nearly 40,000 hectares of tropical evergreen forest had been clearfelled were wiped out when the Cortecium salmonicolor fungus took advantage of the concentration of so much of a single tree variety in a single high-rainfall location. Protests proliferated among villagers who were deprived of livelihood when the forests they had used for fodder, fuel and food were replaced with stands of commercially 'desirable' species.

Under misnamed 'social forestry' programmes bankrolled with state and foreign funds, trees were then planted on common lands, open government lands, and excess lands belonging to big and absentee landlords, mainly to the benefit of the pulp industry and other non-local actors. Millions of private farmers were also given free seedlings, technical help and soft loans to get them to plant eucalyptus for industry on their own land. In states such as Karnataka, Gujarat and Haryana, perhaps a million hectares of farmland were brought under eucalyptus. While the tree grew far better there than it had in the earlier plantations, and led to increased involvement on the part of 'social forestry' programmes in private farm forestry, it usurped land which would otherwise have been used for locally-useful food crops such as ragi and cash crops such as cotton. When the government opened the country to cheap imports of wood, moreover, eucalyptus's reputation as a profit-earner suffered, and pulpwood-planting became less popular among private tree farmers after 1986 (DTE [Delhi] 31.8.1995). In the last decade, pulp firms such as Karnataka Pulpwoods, Ltd. have taken control of village common lands for plantations, igniting protests from commoners who point to violations of customary rights to graze cattle and gather wood and food. Increased intra-village and inter-class conflicts have been another result. A recent scheme to lease out 2.5 million hectares of forest land to the industry at subsidized rates has stirred further controversy (Guha 1988; Gadgil and Guha 1992; SPS 1989; Shiva 1991; Shiva and Bandyopadhyay 1987; Shiva, Sharatchandra and Bandyopadhyay 1982; Saxena 1992a, 1992b; DTE [Delhi] 31.8.1995).

China has also brought vast areas under plantations usable for pulpwood. There, the government has formulated stupendously ambitious plans to increase national tree cover from 12 to 20 per cent, while foreign investors hoping to stoke a potentially gigantic demand appear eager to transform the country's current rather decentralized, small-scale, agriculture-based pulp industry into a more centralized, wood-based one. In Viet Nam, another big new target for international pulpwood investment, plantations already cover, on some estimates, between 1.5 and six per cent of the country. In the Philippines, plantations are used as a means of colonizing indigenous groups as well as supplying a pulp and paper industry chronically short of raw materials.

Other Southern countries where plantations are likely to lead to increasing destruction include Argentina, which in 1994 boasted 770,000 hectares of eucalyptus and pine plantations. There, tree plantations have received support from the state since 1940, but have only recently become geared to export (mostly as logs and sawnwood for pallets). As is the case elsewhere, the FAO has been a main plantation promoter, and further support is now flowing from the World Bank, which has recently approved a forestry development loan, and the European Community, particularly Italy and Spain (SAGP 1994). In 1991, moreover, the Italian government proposed a 'Green Development Plan' for Argentina _ fortunately, it was never implemented _ which was aimed at the plantation of six million hectares of fast-growing trees (mostly eucalyptus and pines), to be planted over 15 years to fill Italy's needs for wood.

Elsewhere in Latin America, US pulp and paper companies such as Simpson Investment and Stone Container are establishing pulpwood plantations in Mexico, Costa Rica and Venezuela to ensure supplies of raw material for their mills (Par 1992, Cheney 1992, Swann 1992), much to the concern of a growing environmentalist public. In the Dominican Republic, a public battle had to be fought by conservationists in 1990 to prevent eucalyptus from being planted in watersheds (Thomen 1990).

In the Congo, meanwhile, Shell is involved in a joint venture with the Unit d'Afforestation Industriel du Congo called Congolaise de Dveloppement Forestier. This firm owns 40,000 hectares of very fast-growth clonal euclayptus plantations at Pointe Noire, the wood from which, harvested every seven years, is exported to pulp mills in the North. While, according to Shell, the plantations 'are established as a mosaic fitting into the natural landscape' (Shell/WWF 1993), the firm's own environmental management plan observes that they are changing the open savanna into a 'veritable eucalyptus forest' (Geerling, N'Sosso and Kitemo 1991).

Plantations aimed at export production are also expanding in many warmer regions of the North, and for many of the same reasons that they are burgeoning in the South, including quick yields and cheap land. Social and environmental impacts, too, are similar, as are, often, styles of resistance.

In Iberia, for instance, a growing fibre-export region, plantations have moved onto both commons and private land, just as they have in India and Thailand, eroding customary forms of livelihood and security and widening class gaps. Between 1940 and 1983, over 273,000 hectares of eucalyptus and 2,668,000 hectares of pine were planted in Spain, coinciding with a decline in rural economies and migration from rural areas. Yields have often been lower than expected, local employment has suffered, water cycles have been disrupted and fires have increased sharply. As in India, the trees have tended to help non-local powers such as absentee landowners make profits out of poor soils without having to be dependent on local communities. They have also degraded soils and wildlife refuges and replaced landscapes capable of sustained yields of products such as game, livestock, honey, herbs, firewood, cork, carving wood, and sheep (Bermejo 1995). In both Spain and Portugal, many of the same forms of protest against plantations are seen as in Asia, including the ripping out of seedlings and saplings by angry local villagers.

Nor do South-North parallels stop there. In Australia, just as in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, both natural forest and plantations have been exploited for pulpwood for export, resulting in public outrage. In New Zealand, as in Chile, large temperate areas are being planted with pine. Even in the southeastern US, an old wood-producing area where more and more forests are being chopped down for export and converted to pine plantations, environmental opposition is having a strong impact. In the Nordic countries, finally, environmentalists are challenging the pulp and paper industry's approach to forest lands at home in what are often the same terms in which Southerners are criticizing the plantation model exported by Nordic consultants (Olsson 1995). 

This book cannot tackle any of these topics in detail. It is hoped, however, that it will prove a useful resource not only to Southerners threatened by the advance of export pulpwood plantations, but also to others concerned with forest industries and their globalization generally.