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

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Chapter 6

Managing Resistance

If the pulp and paper industry needs subsidies in order to be able to expand, it also needs to be able to manage opposition. Negative publicity about deforestation, dioxin, landfills, and so forth _ to say nothing of confrontations with local people over the use of land and water _ can threaten investment, demand, growth, market share and profits alike. Finding ways of taking the offensive on social and environmental issues is thus a preoccupation of nearly everyone in the industry.

Here again, global reach can help. Just as the industry uses world-spanning infrastructure, bureaucracy, and cultural influence to find sources and conduits for the subsidies it attracts, so it acts across wide geographical and cultural distances both to bring a wide variety of resources to bear on opponents and to try to divide them from each other more effectively.

Non-threatening resistance

From industrialists' point of view, some opposition to plantations or pulp and paper mills, while annoying and inconvenient, is relatively easy to get rid of or get around. It does not threaten their most fundamental interests either because it is scattered and localized or because the challenges it poses can be eliminated without overwhelming sacrifices, simply by redistributing resources from one part of a corporation to another. In such cases the industry tends to adopt one or more of the following strategies:

*Wage economic or cultural war on pockets of resisters until they give up the struggle. Smallholders who do not acquiesce in plantation or contract farming schemes may find themselves surrounded with fast-growing trees, their access to roads or rights-of-way cut off. Religious leaders or government employees may be induced to harrass plantation opponents or their families. Where political circumstances permit, resisters may also be isolated by being labeled 'Communists', 'traitors', or 'anti-development'. In areas coveted by speculators hoping to sell land to Shell (Thailand) for a plantation in the late 1980s, gambling schemes were even set up to relieve plantation opponents of their money in order to encourage them to sell out.

*Buy off potential sceptics or resisters with money, land, goods, jobs or status obtained through the proceeds of operations elsewhere. Bribes may be passed out, sports grounds or clinics built, official titles bestowed, temporary jobs distributed, trainings or trips arranged, or gifts of agricultural inputs made. The Al-Pac project, for example, has set up awards and other student programmes for aboriginal peoples in its operating area in Alberta. In Thailand, industry agents often take lucrative contracts or proposals to individuals rather than to communities as a whole, in order to fragment possible opposition.

* Attempt to demonstrate to opponents how their concerns can be met within the industrial system other than through accepting bribes. This strategy amounts to politely inviting opponents to accept 'translations' of their objections into the language of the industry itself, in which these objections become more tractable. Contract farming schemes, which appear to meet the common objection that pulpwood plantations are usurping individual landholdings, are one example (see Chapters 12-13). Another is the promise that the suffering the expansion of plantations brings about today will be seen tomorrow as a mere 'cost' attached to the far greater 'benefits of economic development'.

* Help see to it that resisters are crushed by force. This option must often be chosen against local communities whose livelihoods are entirely dependent on maintaining customary powers over local commons or land, which are felt locally as moral rights. Because the logic of such livelihoods is often incompatible with that of conventional economics, such communities are often not susceptible to the last-mentioned strategy (The Ecologist 1993, Lohmann 1995). In particular, they are difficult to buy off because they are unwilling to accept economic 'tradeoffs' or relinquish their homes, resources or health at any price, and are often unimpressed with appeals to 'national interest'. To be a candidate for intelligent repression, however, opposition must be isolated, small-scale, poorly-coordinated, out of the public eye, or saddled with an unfavourable public image. For this option to work, too, government bureaucracies must decide it is in their own interest to foot the bill for military operations (see chapters 12-13). Thus pulp operations on Indonesia's Outer Islands are often able simply to seize thousands of hectares of the land of non-dominant ethnic groups by force, hoping that local people's isolation and fear of the government will keep them quiet (Kuroda 1995); Aracruz Celulose's initial land clearances in Brazil were also allegedly characterized by violence. In India, however, when common lands under state jurisdiction were taken over by Karnataka Pulpwood Ltd. in the 1980s, well-publicized mass marches and demonstrations during which eucalyptus saplings were uprooted and replaced with saplings of food and fodder trees resulted in an industry retreat (SPS 1989; JV 9-12.1990, 3.1991). A 1991-2 programme by Thailand's military government to evict millions of villagers from state forest land to make way for private sector pulpwood plantations was also stymied by high-profile, large-scale opposition.

* Prevent certain forms of opposition from being heard by insisting on framing all discussions of plantations in the idiom of neoclassical economics and 'global demand' rather than in the languages of ordinary farmers or of everyday politics. This strategy, an analogue of physical suppression, attempts to deny opponents the opportunity of formulating their objections in the conceptual framework of their choice. The aim is to make issues of land rights, non-economic forms of livelihood, and so on, simply unraisable, since industry finds it difficult to win debates framed in these terms. Thus discussion is restricted to terms on the right side of Table 6.1. The actual implementation of this strategy, conveniently enough, can often be 'assigned' to true-believing technocrats and other ideologues not directly tied to industry. Many academic economists and foresters, for example, even without prior consultation with industry, will shun any discussion of how paper demand is created: such discussions necessarily question their premise that human beings, as Homo economicus, are characterized by in principle infinitely increasing needs. Executives who know better, acknowledging the paper industry's need 'to fight for our future and create our own growth', can thus stay in the background (Clark 1994).

TABLE 6.1: 
Muting opposition through language

table under construction

* Acquiesce, where necessary, to certain demands made by critics. This becomes an attractive choice where (i) opponents cannot be bought off or persuaded to modify their demands; (ii) suppression is counter-productive or impossible due to the scale, coordination, intensity, inaccessibility or public visibility of resistance; and (iii) acquiescence would not actually destroy the industry or relevant companies. Thus Western companies are slowly capitulating to strong and widespread opposition to chlorine-using industrial processes, treating it as an 'economic' reason for investing in new technology. (In doing so, in fact, they may be able to outcompete rivals with fewer resources.) Nor does the call for more recycling greatly trouble an industry long accustomed to using waste paper as raw material. Rather, it is fairly easily fed into overall supply/demand equations, and public relations officers welcome increased recycling capacity as an opportunity to claim 'green' status.

* Move out of an area where local resistance is intractable. This becomes a strategic option in the same circumstances as those listed immediately above, but in which other regions appear more malleable to corporate exploitation. Hence it is often a cost-effective choice for companies with sufficient global reach. Japan's paper industry, for example, has had simply to accept environmentalist resistance in Western North America as an 'economic' datum beyond a political solution and accordingly shift its search for raw materials elsewhere, including the South. Shell, similarly, has had to abandon its pulpwood plantation plans in Thailand in order to concentrate on similar schemes elsewhere.

More difficult forms of resistance

Some obstacles to the expansion of the pulp and paper industry present deeper threats. No paper corporation, faced with coordinated, publicly-visible opposition to development of new industrial wood fibre sources across large areas of the globe, can buy it off everywhere it arises, smash it wholesale, or shift its search for raw materials to another planet. If, as Ronald A. Duchin of the US corporate public relations firm Mongoven Biscoe & Duchin points out, local groups who believe that they 'should have direct power over industry' are 'difficult to deal with' (PRW 10-12.1993), alliances of such organizations are that much more so.

Nor can any paper corporation acquiesce to calls for reduced demand for all its products. Movements which show signs of moving beyond questioning one or another product (such as chlorine-bleached or non-recycled paper grades) or company toward questioning the ethos of ever-increasing per capita paper consumption itself are difficult for the industry to accommodate. The pulp and paper industry, like others, relies for its growth on the suppression of a sense of 'enough' and on the blurring of distinctions between necessity and luxury demand. The skewed distribution of consumption displayed in Tables 2.4 and 2.5 is, for paper executives, evidence not that high consumers are consuming too much but that others are consuming too little. The fact that paper demand is potentially fragile in spite of efforts to embed paper consumption ever more thoroughly into daily life _ during economic recessions, for instance, advertising can fall off rapidly without consumers rising up in outrage at being deprived of magazine inserts or new four-colour packaging _ makes the industry particularly defensive about critiques of infinitely-increasing demand (Price 1995). David Clark of the Confederation of European Paper Industries recently told his colleagues that the 'important question is whether paper will show the same relationship to economic development as it has in the past':

Consumers are no longer what they used to be. . . . [they] wish to know the origins, content and method of manufacture of the paper they use . . . Their behaviour is . . . less predictable than it was. . . . Our industry stands accused, quite unjustly, of . . . creating garbage mountains. This concern . . . could . . . reduce the long-term demand for paper [, as] has already happened to packaging where in most of the legislation the first priority is to use less. . . . Many paper and board producers in the packaging sector believe that the requirement to use less and lighter packaging spells the end of growth in the sector. Similar concerns can be seen in other sectors _ junk mail, unnecessary advertising, etc. Like packaging, paper itself, once synonymous with civilization and culture, could now be seen as an unnecessary and environmentally damaging material. If you think I am being unduly pessimistic and influenced by a few environmental extremists just visit any primary or secondary school to meet the next generation of consumers. Our industry can no longer afford to take long-term growth for granted. More and more we shall have to fight for our future and create our own growth. In this respect paper itself becomes increasingly a consumer product where total demand has to be stimulated. The alternative, to do nothing, could produce a static or even declining demand with serious implications for the industry, its reputation, its technology and the quality of the people it attracts. . . . Until the paper industry and its allies come together to . . . convince the public of the social and ecological value of paper, our industry will continue to be vulnerable to more and increasingly damaging environmental attacks. In this we have something to learn from other industries such as chemicals (Clark 1994).

It is a waste of time for industry to try to cultivate critics with whom it has irreconcilable conflicts concerning land or demand creation. Better by far for it to cut its losses with them and concentrate on isolating them from potential allies of different experience and social class. Unable either to crush such critics or to accommodate and conciliate them sufficiently, industry adopts the ancient strategy of divide and conquer.

That entails a dual approach. With those stubbornly resisting takeover of land or water for plantations, or the ethos of infinitely-increasing demand, industry must cut its losses and resign itself to the risks associated with showing indifference, breaking promises, smearing opponents, or practicing evasion, denial, repression or trickery. At the same time, it must actively cultivate governments and uncommitted but powerful urban and Northern middle classes, including consumers or environmentalists, who live at some distance from mills and plantations.

Thus pulp and paper interests in Indonesia have resorted to repression, abuses, and attempts to divide communities against themselves at home while hiring public relations firms to present a softer picture to customers and legislators in the West. Finland's Enso, too, while taking advantage of Indonesia's investment climate by involving itself in a joint pulpwood venture in west Kalimantan (see Chapter 11), has let it be known that no less an organization than the World Wide Fund for Nature will be helping to 'assess the project's environmental impact' should any international observers have questions about the project (PPI 3.1995).

Jaakko Poyry consultants, similarly, largely abandoned efforts to enlist environmentalists to their side midway through the company's master planning exercise in Thailand, smearing and breaking promises to them, while channeling money to selected NGOs and the bureaucracy and taking pains to ensure that the nature and extent of opposition to the master plan within Thailand did not become important news in Finland (see Chapter 12). And when P"yry Chief Executive Officer Henrik Ehrnrooth and top P"yry consultant Jouko Virta were criticized in Finland about P"yry's involvement in a plantation project in the Dominican Republic, they simply denied in public having ever been in that country, despite being shown a Dominican newspaper story and photograph of Virta shaking hands with a Dominican official in a Dominican setting (Wallgren 1994). While such lying could be expected to provoke outrage in the Dominican Republic, this does not greatly matter as long as it is believed in Finland, since the tactical point is merely to prevent Dominican plantation opponents' claims from being taken seriously by the Finnish public. Similar practices are also followed in Japan. When a Kyodo News Service reporter uncovered Marubeni's illegal chipping of Bintuni Bay mangroves in Indonesia, for example, the company intervened with his boss in order to suppress publication. Japanese media coverage of the huge national outcry in Australia over wood chip exports to Japan has also been virtually nonexistent (Kuroda 1995).

Wisely, the pulp and paper industry tends to avoid entering debates it cannot easily win, such as the debate over excessive Northern demand. Instead, it tries to prevent such debates from being heard by the wider public. One way of doing this is to attempt to marginalize opponents who try to get such debates started. Wherever 'environmentalism' has become mainstream, it has become difficult to do so by labeling them 'Communist', 'fascist', 'traitorous' or 'anti-development' as part of a strategy of suppression. Instead, industry attempts to redefine and embrace 'environmentalism' itself in a way which implicitly sets such opponents apart as radical or irresponsible (PRW 4.94, 1.93). Moreover, by promoting, in the North, the use of an idiom which identifies economic growth with livelihood, paper consumption with literacy, and large corporations as merely another group of 'concerned citizens', the industry strives to create an atmosphere in which grassroots resistance in the South appears cranky or, even better, inconceivable.

Arjo Wiggins Appleton executives O. Fernandez Carro and Robert A. Wilson sum up such strategies well when they urge their colleagues not to target 'apparent opposition' if that means 'forgetting the vast mass in between: the public' and not to 'respond to the mobile agenda of others' but rather to 'write the agenda and diffuse negative issues'. Politics, they go on, provides the packaging and the vehicle to achieve the industrial objectives. Success is measured by the freedom to plant fibre crops, recognizing the sum total of all the political forces (in the broadest sense). There are two elements to the political subsystem [of the total quality system of industrial forestry]: the message and the target. The message needs to be short, nontechnical, and fundamental: for example, 'Trees are good. We need more trees not less'. Our objective should be to create and move inside an ever-increasing friendly circle of public opinion (1992).

US public relations firm Mongoven, Biscoe and Duchin (MBD) take the counsel of Wilson and Fernandez Carro one step further by suggesting that industrial corporations deal with environmental and other activists by dividing them into four categories. 'Opportunist' activists interested in adding a string of career triumphs to their own personal curriculum vitae, MBD proposes, can be dealt with by providing them 'with at least the perception of a partial victory'. 'Idealists', who 'want a perfect world', although they may hold considerable moral authority with the public because they have no visible vested interests, can be neutralized if they can be convinced that their position is causing harm to others. So-called 'realists', meanwhile, are even easier to 'seek an arrangement' with. Because they tend to be relatively inexperienced in the workings of power outside corporate and NGO corridors, such 'realists' are easily taken in by industry's claim to be the 'only show in town'. They are also naively credulous of industry's claim that the only way of getting its attention for the purpose of effective 'damage control' is to accept its language, learn to 'live with tradeoffs', and abjure radical change. The group likely to present the most effective challenge to advancement of corporate interests, MBD concludes, are 'radicals' interested in 'social justice and political empowerment', who cannot be restricted to single technical issues.

Given this taxonomy, corporate divide-and-conquer strategy is obvious: isolate the 'radicals', cultivate the 'idealists' and educate them to be 'realists', then coopt the 'realists' into agreeing with industry. Without the support of 'idealists' and 'realists', MBD suggests, the 'radical' and 'opportunistic' positions will begin to 'look shallow and self-serving' to the public. The credibility of the 'radicals' will be lost and the 'opportunists' can then be counted on to share in the final 'policy resolution' (PRW 4.94).

Public relations, intelligence, and 'astroturf'

The thinking of Fernandez Carro and Wilson and MDB highlights how thoroughly industry's divide-and-conquer strategy is enmeshed in the contemporary mechanics of public relations. The future of the plantation, pulp and paper industries is likely to be highly dependent not only on advertising, the bribery of experts, and other classic forms of 'the engineering of consent', but also on intelligence-gathering, counter-intelligence, infiltration, division and funding of NGOs, cooption of environmentalists, political subversion and provocation, and the creation of fake grassroots movements. Also crucial are those related 20th-century arts of enclosing or replacing democracy known as opinion polling and cost-benefit analysis (Stauber and Rampton 1995, Carey 1995, Adams 1994, Hitchens 1994).

Some forestry industry consulting firms carry out such activities themselves. In 1993, for instance, Jaakko P"yry began to publish a confidential quarterly intelligence report on environmentalist thinking and activities, aimed at a clientele of wealthy companies. The editors of the report, known as EcoDigest, collect information partly by monitoring NGO publications, watching environmentalists' electronic mail conferences, and sending queries to environmental groups. One such query to a Canadian group was aimed at determining if 'your organization has a policy as regards forest plantations. If so, do you see them as a Good Thing (e.g., because they take pressure off primary forests) or a Bad Thing (e.g., because they reduce biodiversity)? Furthermore, what are the arguments you use?' (Ikonen 1994, Orton 1994). The Swedish Pulp and Paper Association, meanwhile, has started sending out regular 'press briefings' on the environmental virtues of tree plantations, and PaperInfo also publishes news on environmental groups in its Environews section.

Other important actors in pulp and paper hire outside public relations and advertising firms. Concerned about its environmental image among British paper consumers, for example, the Finnish Forest Industries Federation is paying the London firm Jackie Cooper PR to disseminate information detailing its environmental commitments; while Canada's MacMillan Bloedel has hired Pielle and Finland's United Paper Mills has retained EIBIS International to carry out similar assignments. The Finnish industry became particularly assiduous in inviting journalists and environmentalists to tour its forests in 1994 following a damaging article about Finnish forestry practices in the mass-circulation German periodical Der Spiegel. The Indonesian timber industry, meanwhile, has employed high-priced Western advertising firms, including Grey/MediaCom, to prepare print and television advertisements claiming, falsely, that clear-cutting is not permitted in Indonesia, that areas which in fact are to be logged are being set aside as 'permanent forest', and that the country's forest management is 'sustainable'.

TABLE 6.2
Leading US PR firms working on enviromental issues

table under construction

Source: PRW 4.94, 1.95

Clients of the world's largest PR company, the US firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M) _ which boasts annual fees totalling over $200 million, 2,071 employees, 62 offices in 29 countries, and its own Environmental Practice Group _ meanwhile include Kimberly-Clark, Asea Brown Boveri, Dow Chemical, TetraPak, Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment, Shell, and the Government of Indonesia (Stauber and Rampton 1995). For more than a decade, B-M has helped forestry firms shedding jobs pioneer a novel combination of union-busting and anti-environmentalism. During a period in which it has taken B-M's advice, for example, the US firm Louisiana-Pacific has destroyed its workers' union and built pulp mills in Mexico where it has been able to pay workers less than US$2 per hour for processing US logs. At the same time, it has encouraged threatened employees to blame environmentalists for their plight, bussing them to rallies staged to counter forest protection movements and nourishing the growth of pro-logging 'grassroots' groups. After helping to sow similar anti-environmentalist sentiment across forest regions of western Canada, B-M advised its forestry industry clients to set up the British Columbia Forest Alliance, a front group 75 per cent funded by 16 forestry companies, which could then position itself as a 'moderate' organization on environmental issues (Nelson 1994). Other multinational public relations firms becoming active on the green front (see Table 6.2 for prominent US firms) can also be expected to become increasingly involved in work supporting the pulp, paper and plantation industries.

Among the services which the 'green teams' at such firms can offer the pulp and paper industry are the following:

* Lobbying domestic or foreign parliamentarians or govern-ment officials, often using parliamentary veterans, former environmentalists or former reporters, in order to secure favourable legislation or enforcement on trade, environ-mental, or other issues.

* Disseminating propaganda supporting industry positions, including 'scientific' evidence emanating from pundits or research organizations funded by industry, and placing advertisements and 'advertorials' in mass-circulation newspapers and other periodicals as well as commercials on television. PR disguised as news or disinterested commen-tary is increasingly reaching the columns of the most respectable publications and is often reproduced by mainstream or academic book publishers as well.

* Suppressing enviromentalist books before they are printed by sabotaging promotional tours, planting callers to talk shows, or convincing journalists that books are unsubstan-tiated (PRW 10.94)

* Infiltrating environmentalists' meetings in the guise of activists or housewives to gather information or 'guide' discussions. In Britain, there is considerable evidence that environmentalists' telephones are tapped both by govern-ment and by private security firms.

* Posing as journalists in order to obtain previews of research results which might be damaging to industry.

* Setting up fake 'environmentalist' NGOs with a pro-industry agenda yet no obvious financial interests (including so-called 'astroturf' grassroots groups, named after the artificial grass used in some American sports arenas) (PRW 10.94). Forestry corporations such as Weyerhaeuser are also creating 'community advisory panels' or conducting 'open community forums' in efforts to regulate and co-opt criticism of the industry (Weyerhaeuser 1995).

* Helping Southern elites win over Northern consumers through advertising and other means.

* Keeping clients posted on global warming, packaging, rainforests, Green political parties, seeds, pesticides, chlorine, biotechnology, eco-marketing and certification.

* Monitoring and collecting data on environmental journalists and their interests and weaknesses so that they can be better manipulated.

* Building up files on activist groups, their leaderships, methods of operation, anticipated reactions to new products, funding sources, and 'potential for industry relationship' with an eye to finding out 'what's motivating them, how serious they are, what they will consider "success"' (PRW 1.93, 4.94).

* Advising corporations on how to offer financial support to NGOs with heavy needs for funding and 'respectability'. Tellingly, corporate sponsors of large US-based organizations such as World Wide Fund for Nature and Environmental Defense Fund have also funded about one-quarter of the 37 organizations described in the Greenpeace Guide to Anti-Environmental Organizations (PRW 1.95).

* Advising corporations on how to put critical individual environmentalists or former government regulators on their payrolls. One of the authors of this book, for instance, was offered a consultancy at Shell following his involvement in a campaign against Shell's involvement in a Thai plantation project.

Given the convergence of method between public relations and government intelligence or police organizations, together with the increasing interest of both in managing 'green' issues, organizations critical of the spread of pulpwood plantations can expect in the future to be the subjects of a growing variety of sophisticated political dirty tricks. Fake letters or literature will be disseminated, and incidents manufactured or provoked, which either divide environmentalists against each other or discredit them in the eyes of the public. Agents provocateurs placed in green movements have already been responsible for considerable violence in the US, particularly on the West Coast (Helvarg 1994), and Hill and Knowlton has distributed a phony memorandum using an Earth First letterhead calling for acts of violence 'to fuck up the mega machine' (PRW 1.95). Such tactics draw on the experience of the US's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which has frequently attempted to break up domestic political movements not only by murder, assault, bombings, harrassment, and subsidized book publication, but also by 'bad-jacketing', or making dissident groups suspicious that colleagues are associated with rightist organizations or are corporate spies, or paranoiac about state or corporate surveillance (Churchill and van der Wall 1988). In addition, the practice of cultivating public hostility toward activists by framing them for various outrages _ historically used widely by Southern security apparatuses against environmentalists and others, by the FBI against US liberation and civil rights movements, and by the UK's MI5 against trade unions _ is likely to be used more extensively in the future against Northern environmentalists as well.

Supporting conditions

Industry's attempts to divide plantation critics from potential allies are made easier by a number of cultural factors.

First, the idiom in which corporations prefer to have discussions framed _ an idiom which tends to equate the left and right sides of Table 6.1 _ is already accepted by a large part of the public to which all sides appeal. In particular, mainstream news organs such as The Economist, The New York Times and Time magazine still regularly claim that the technical 'expertise' Northern governments and corporations urge on the South is neutral, politically disinterested, and universally beneficial to livelihood. From this perspective, the anger of Southerners who see the damaging effects of such 'experts' intervention on their daily lives, even on those few occasions when that anger is reported in the Northern press, often appears bewildering, irrational, even unintelligible. What seems to many Southern activists to be common sense _ that 'economic development' is destroying occupations and making people hungry _ often appears in the North as a contradiction in terms.

It is immensely useful to globalizing pulp and paper interests, moreover, that there exist very few channels through which Finns, say, can come to understand Thai ways of life, or US citizens to understand Brazilian culture. Protests which are potent in Southern contexts thus lose much of their force when transposed to Northern ones, helping to keep Southern plantation opponents divided from potential allies in the North. Self-flattering Northern cultural lore, for example, holds there to be a predetermined sequence of developmental stages through which all societies must pass until they have replicated the Northern 'success story'. Southern plantation opponents who reject this lore are often dismissed by astounded Northern observers as being simply outside the pale. When told of Thai NGO opposition to pulp plantations in Thailand, for example, one Swedish forester, despite having no personal or institutional stake in the issue, was frankly mystified, remarking that 'as a Swede, I cannot accept that, because almost all of Sweden is covered with plantations' (Usher 1994). By disproportionately strengthening actors with a global reach, such gaps in understanding help push along the process of globalization.

Third, in many of its endeavours the plantation and pulp and paper sector enjoys the tacit support of various nominally independent experts (a few of them even associated with NGOs such as the World Resources Institute and the International Institute for Environment and Development) who are not necessarily either financially supported by industry, or particular targets of public relations firms, or otherwise directly associated with private firms. Such experts, whether foresters, biologists, or economists, tend not even to consider the possibility of making alliances with dissident villagers, even of their own nationality. One of the results, as Chapter 4 has pointed out, has been the emergence of two distinct, seemingly conflicting, yet equally extensive 'libraries' detailing the effects of commercial tree plantations, one cited by proponents and one cited by critics.

Dividing experts from plantation opponents

Why do so many seemingly independent professionals often work in a way which pits them against rural dwellers adversely affected by pulpwood plantations? Part of the explanation, Chapter 4 has suggested, lies with such experts' reductionist approach to knowledge. Yet to stop here is to leave many difficult questions unanswered and thus to risk political ineffectiveness. Why, for example, do many scientists, economists and NGOs who accept much of the critique of pulpwood plantations, and who are not wildly averse to putting their own fields in an interdisciplinary perspective, still act in a way which supports the abuses of the industry? What are the psychological, cultural, and political roots of their stance? If 'reductionism' is a problem, can plantation critics do anything to encourage such intellectuals to abandon it? The loyalty which many experts hold for the idea that it is mainly industry and capitalism which hold the answers to the problems they create, in short, is of a type and degree which requires an explanation which has not yet been given.

Many experts, of course, frustrated by having to work for organizations which they know cannot act on their most important recommendations, have learned, as a matter of psychological self-defence, to moderate those recommendations while averting their gaze from the political meaning of such actions. Some are even driven into denying that their actions have a political meaning. As one eminent Yale University forester has remarked, 'There are so many foresters accustomed to taking orders from on high that they don't question. They just go on drawing their pay and saying it's not their fault' (Vail 1993). Another part of the explanation of the limitations and lacunae in the thinking of many scientists, economists, and NGO staff lies in the class, social, or educational background which they tend to share with each other and with industry figures (Dove 1992, Frossard 1995). This tempts them to seek out, and listen to, each other and to industry, rather than delve too deeply into unfamiliar facts or social milieux. The simple lack of awareness on the part of many experts of the many existing social alternatives to 'working with industry' should never be underestimated. The familiar notion that certain scientific 'paradigms' exercise a hegemony over experts' imaginations also helps explain the pervasiveness of pro-industry attitudes among intellectuals who seemingly have no vested interests _ although, unless this explanation is combined with a thoroughgoing sociology and history of scientific practices, it leaves mysterious where these 'paradigms' come from and how they might be challenged.

A more fundamental part of the explanation perhaps has to do with many experts' innocent beliefs about power. In the academic, planning, and development circles in which many experts and large, well-financed NGOs move _ circles which have flourished during the process of globalization _ power is frequently represented as something which industry and its governmental and intergovernmental allies 'possess' and which others (who are characterized as their beneficiaries or victims) 'lack'. It is not difficult to see what nourishes this conception. Experts are accustomed to the interplay of power in the restricted arena of their offices, laboratories, and social milieux, where experience teaches them that industry, the state and international organizations 'get things done'. The easiest way such experts have of conceptualizing other actors with whom they are less familiar is to assume that they are what these bodies are not: that is, powerless.

Professionals have a vested interest in viewing themselves, moreover, as repositories of knowledge which others lack. Bringing about the changes they desire, they often assume, must then be a matter of ferrying that knowledge to industry, the state and their allies, who, as mentioned above, are in turn seen as having the power that others lack. This does not mean that experts need always agree with industry and the state, or cannot ever take the side of their victims. It does mean, however, that if experts do fight for the downtrodden, they tend to be willing to do so only if they are allowed to present their case in lawyerlike fashion, and transformed into proper 'knowledge', to the people they imagine to be 'the powerful'. The most important audience for the truth, the assumption goes, is industry, the state, and their allies.

Of course, as experts are the first to admit, 'speaking truth to power' in this way may not always get results, despite the flattering noises industry makes to court expert endorsement. To have the chance to speak truth to power even once in a while, moreover, requires staying on its good side and thus acceding to frequent and frustrating compromises. But making compromises with industry and the state, the reasoning goes, is at least more likely to result in effective 'damage control' than making compromises with impotent villagers. Surely, hopeful professionals reason, governments, corporations and international agencies are likely to let us be their 'brains' at least some of the time!

It is only on this naive, dichotomous have/lack view of power and knowledge that some of the preposterous utterances of experts who have formed de facto alliances with industry begin to make sense. The claim of one IIED consultant that to reject the framework of the industry-oriented Tropical Forestry Action Programme would be to 'start from square one', for example, is intelligible only on the assumption that opponents of the plan are so powerless that supporting their own environmental movements would be a dead end (Sargent 1990). An Audubon Society official's insistence that 'conservationists have just got to learn to work with industry', similarly, is plausible only if one excludes from the outset the possibility that one can influence the establishment game by not playing it as well as by playing it (PRW 1.95, Ferguson 1994, Scott 1990). The notion that good environmental practice or local communities' rights can be 'secured' only by appealing to governments or to the United Nations is based on the same illusory dichotomy between official power and vernacular impotence, as is the widespread notion that the only way to engage in effective environmental 'damage control' is to participate in activities dominated by states, international organizations, and business.

Indeed, it is probably not too much to say that the have/lack view of power and knowledge _ and the Orientalism and lack of intercultural engagement out of which this view grows (Said 1978, Lohmann 1993) _ lie at the root of a whole cluster of false cliches about social change. These include the cliche that activists must choose between, on the one hand, acting on principle and being impotent and, on the other, compromising and being effective; between having 'clean hands and living in an ivory tower' and having 'dirty hands and living in the real world'; between being uncompromising but powerless 'idealists' and compromising but influential 'realists'. Only on the odd assumption that ordinary people are not engaged in power politics, and do not dirty their hands with compromises, could such ideas get off the ground. Only on the assumption that effective grassroots movements do not exist could the alternative to 'working with industry' be seen to be 'living in an ivory tower with only one's principles for company'. And only on the assumption that governments or international organizations are powerful but neutral machines awaiting programming by experts could those experts allow themselves to be divided so easily from potential allies at the grassroots.

So seductive is the image of power as something which the state, international organizations, and industry 'have' and others 'lack' that it often prevents evidence of grassroots power from even being seen. Has a plantation scheme been cancelled in a Southern country? Has a logging ban been instituted? Has a pulp mill improved its effluent treatment? The natural assumption of many experts is that such things can't have happened because of popular resistance. There must be some other, invisible explanation. Some Western environmentalist must have met quietly with officials to point out the error of their ways. Or perhaps a secret deal was struck at high governmental levels to get logs from some other country. Or perhaps a think tank released a new cost-benefit analysis or proposed a new natural resource accounting scheme. It thus becomes difficult even in principle for many experts to recognize counterexamples to their assumption that there is only one true language of power, that spoken by themselves, business and officialdom. While this assumption flatters professionals' feelings of self-worth and helps expert institutions secure funding, it only further entrenches contempt for the public.

Ironically, the have/lack picture of power, regarded as so 'realistic' by its acolytes, is one to which corporations and governments themselves _ at least those which have lasted _ have never subscribed, although it is in their interest for them often to advertise themselves as doing so. As this book makes clear in nearly every chapter, when the plantation, pulp and paper industry speaks to itself, or maneuvers to gain 'freedom to plant', or maps strategy with PR specialists, it reveals a persistent and pragmatic preoccupation with grassroots resistance and the opinions of ordinary people. While the industry is also concerned to win over the newspaper, the government official, the college professor and the professionalized NGO, fear of the irate crowd who may be so stupid or disobedient as not to listen to these luminaries is never far from its collective mind. As always, the self-styled 'realists' eager to 'speak truth to power' turn out to be largely the victims of their own naive and self-aggrandizing fantasies, encouraged by the genuine realists of the corporate and official worlds who, by contrast, are always conscious of having to act against a constant background of opposition. The more that potential professional critics of plantations are neutralized in this way, the more easily effective expert-grassroots political alliances can be prevented.

Stories for the uninformed public

Most plantation industry propaganda is disseminated as part of the general divide-and-conquer strategy for managing difficult opposition. This propaganda seldom seeks to convince critics who already have a good knowledge of local plantation conditions or of industry maneuverings; as Fernandez Carro and Wilson intimate, these critics are not likely to be susceptible to it. Rather, industry propaganda tends to be aimed at consumers, officials, and environmentalists whose day-to-day lives are not touched by production operations, and who have little time to acquaint themselves with the technical issues. Correspondingly, it is usually deployed through the channels which will reach these groups best: public debates, newspaper columns, and governmental negotiations. The purpose throughout is to prevent critics with some knowledge of the industry's actions from finding support from potential allies in other circles.

Among the bite-sized 'messages' which the plantation and pulp and paper industry have disseminated to this end are the following:

* Pulpwood plantations can 'relieve some of the pressure' on the world's natural forests (Bazett 1993: 100).

Without extensive plantations being established in the South, it is said, and with continuing rising demand, both local old-growth forests and distant ones such as those in Siberia will become more economically attractive to the pulp industry; yet with plantations they can be saved. This 'message' has a theoretical attractiveness which can appeal to Northern groups not directly acquainted with the facts on the ground, but must be used with care elsewhere. For one thing, as the case studies of Part Two will show in detail, for historical, technical, economic and political reasons alike, plantations and increased logging of natural forests often go hand in hand. The logging of natural forest often provides the necessary funding for, or is justified by, the establishment of industrial plantations. In Chile, for example, many plantations are being established by logging native hardwoods which might otherwise have survived; as one industry source admits, the sudden expansion of wood chip exports has 'exerted pressure on native forests, even though the pulp and paper industry uses only plantation wood' [sic]. In Argentina, a British-based company planned to embark on an integrated scheme to log in a 50,000-hectare area containing natural quebracho (Schinopis lorentzii) and algarrobo (Prosopis spp.) forest in Santiago del Estero and then replace it with eucalyptus, until environmentalists got wind of the scheme. In Brazil, Veracruz Florestal has destroyed native forests in Mata Atlantica in Bahia to plant eucalyptus, with advice from Jaakko P"yry. In Thailand's Nakorn Ratchasima and Chachoengsao provinces, too, as well as in Malaysia, Kalimantan and Sumatra, logging and plantations have gone hand in hand. Many plantations in Indonesia are subsidized by logging revenues recycled through the state. Second, the establishment of plantations on already deforested land tends to induce the inhabitants to settle in forests elsewhere (as has happened in Thailand), resulting in deforestation at a distance, and sometimes even setting off a chain reaction of further impoverishment and forest destruction. (See Part Two.) Finally, pulpwood plantations are not designed to supply industrial sawlogs, nor logs for plywood, and so can hardly remove what are probably the dominant motivations for logging tropical forests, particularly in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

* Pulpwood plantations can increase aggregate tree cover.

'Trees are good,' the industry rationale goes. 'We need more trees, not less.' Again, this disingenuous 'message' is plausible but must not be used with audiences aware that the establishment of large monoculture pulpwood plantations is, as suggested above, merely a continuation of deforestation by other means. It must also not be used with audiences alert to importance of the distinction between mere tree cover and forest. The exotic, homogeneous trees of an industrial plantation cannot in any way fulfil the same environmental functions as the trees of a forest, which interact with soils, the water cycle, animals, other plants, and surrounding ecosystems in a way that assures the regeneration potential of each.

Tellingly, the confusion between forests and plantations which the industry is eager to promote with uninformed audiences is one which it is equally eager to disavow with more sophisticated audiences. With the latter, the industry insists that pulpwood plantations be judged not as forests but as agricultural crops (Aracruz Celulose 1996), asking its critics why they do not condemn fields of maize with equal fervour. Needing to appeal to audiences with different levels of understanding, the industry must try to have it both ways.

* Indefinitely rising paper demand is either inevitable or desirable or both.

This assumption is so fundamental a part of the contemporary ideology of economic growth that it is seldom stated explicitly and even less often discussed. To call it into question among a business audience tends to elicit either silence or the rebuttal 'Do you want to go back to the Stone Age?', and it is reinforced in other arenas by repeated uncritical reference, for example, to FAO projections of demand increase. Taken together with the idea that further exploitation of old growth is undesirable, the assumption leads naturally to the conclusion that plantations must be expanded and that side effects, however regrettable they may be, are unavoidable. The search for 'alternatives' to the current paper and pulp production model, instead of being concerned with such social matters as demand creation or the desirability of junk mail or mini-packaging, thus becomes narrowed to the search for 'alternative technical means of increasing production'. For an appropriate response to this ideology, it is useful to turn once again to the late ex-FAO forester Jack Westoby:

Can we be sure that it is in the public interest that pulp and paper should be a growth industry? . . . [I]t irks me to have to carry about a kilogramme of newsprint when all I want is a gramme of news. I also begrudge the time it takes me to transfer 50 or 60 unsolicited circulars from my letter-box to my waste bin every week . . . My blood pressure rises each time I pick up a package at the supermarket and discover when I get home that it takes at least ten minutes and a good deal of ingenuity to penetrate it and reach the contents. The fact is that the pulp and paper industry produces a lot of things I don't want, that I never asked for, but that I am compelled to have and also compelled to pay for, directly or indirectly. As an individual, I resent all these things. As a member of the community, it strikes me as irrational.

Westoby adds that if a country 'sets as its goal a specific future level of GNP per head, and assumes that this carries with it a connotation of so many kilos per head of paper and board, . . . it is setting out on the wrong foot'. Treating such numbers as divinities is like projecting recent US heroin-consumption trends in linear fashion into the future, which rapidly leads one to the conclusion that 'every man, woman and child in the US will be a junkie by 2020' (Westoby 1987).

* Demand for paper comes not from particular groups, classes, or societies, but rather from 'the globe' or 'the nation' as a whole.

* To argue against the large-scale spread of pulpwood plantations is to deny Third World schoolchildren the books they need, or to claim that only Northerners are entitled to milk cartons.

This sentimental message, when floated by industry executives in public forums, cynically hopes to trade on its audience's ignorance. As the industry knows perhaps better than anyone else, new plantations are established principally to feed surges in consumption in heavily-consuming industrial and elite sectors _ particularly for items such as advertising and export and supermarket packaging _ and do not respond effectively to the cry of the downtrodden for education, food, and basic necessities. (See Chapter 3.) The message also quietly begs the question of what the outcome of potential negotiations between the downtrodden who are resisting the establishment of plantations around their homes and those others, downtrodden or not, who want to use paper derived from those plantations. Why, after all, should it be treated as a foregone conclusion that paper consumers would not change their expectations if they had an opportunity of entering into a dialogue with those affected by the plantations which feed them? Nevertheless, the message often powerfully sways socially-concerned outsiders who are unversed in the structure of paper demand or the undemocratic way in which it is created. For example, the Executive Director of one prominent Northern NGO recently remarked dismissively, echoing mainstream economic ideology, that to investigate paper demand critically would involve dictating to ordinary people what their wants and preferences should be (Sandbrook 1995).

* Fast-growing monoculture plantations are up to ten times more productive than natural forests.

In one sense of 'productive' _ 'productive of trees with market value as pulpwood over at least two or three growing cycles' _ this 'message' is true. In other senses of 'productive', however _ for example, 'productive of other trees, of animals, vegetables, fruit, mushrooms, fodder, fertilizers, water retention capacity and medicines, and of improved agriculture on neighbouring fields' _ it obviously is not. Hence this 'message' cannot count in favour of plantations unless it is accompanied by an explanation of why the first sense of 'productive' should be privileged over others. To be democratic, this discussion must include affected people speaking in their own idioms. Yet when used by industrialists, state foresters, and some economists, the claim that plantations are 'productive' is often used in a context in which other meanings of 'productive' are ignored or suppressed and those who might articulate them excluded from the discussion. In such contexts, the claim is misleading and the discussion biased.

* Fast-growing tree plantations can help curb global warming.

This notion has proved extremely attractive to Northern elites who are reluctant to cut their fossil-fuel emissions, disinclined to master the intricacies of improving energy-use efficiency, and naively confident of their corporations' ability to implant large-scale plantations in any political context in the world. It has already legitimized environmentally-damaging plantations in Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Costa Rica, Brazil and Malaysia _ most of which are intended to 'offset' carbon dioxide emissions from Northern industries. Various proposals have also been presented to the Global Environment Facility of the World Bank (GEF) to establish carbon plantations in Africa with co-financing from electric power firms in the North (Fearnside 1993).

Some industrialized-country environmentalists such as Norman Myers have even gone on record with the preposterous claim that grand-scale plantations are the leading way of buying time in which to cut CO2 emissions (Myers 1990). The Noordwijk Declaration, signed by 63 countries in 1989, reinforced this wild notion, calling for an increase in the rate of tree plantation establishment to 12 million hectares annually by the year 2000 as a response to global warming. Corporations and multilateral and bilateral agencies, too, have learned to wave their hands about 'global warming benefits' when attempting to justify plantation projects they support for other reasons. For example, a recent report sponsored by the Swedish Forest Industry Water and Air Pollution Research Foundation recently found that 'Swedish forests bind greenhouse gases' even when the effects of pulp, paper and timber production using those 'forests' as raw material were taken into account (Skogsindustrierna press release 29.4.94).

However, such arguments are not very effective as justifications for industrial plantations with audiences aware that in any economic and political regime in which large fast-growing plantations are likely to be established, it is far more probable that they will be a cause of, than that they will be a solution to, global warming. These audiences will be conscious, for instance, of plantations' powerful and difficult-to-calculate role in accelerating deforestation, whether through direct encroachment on forests or through the displacement and deskilling of local people (see Chapters 7, 8, 11 and 12). They will also point out that the peak carbon mass of a plantation is far less than that of a natural tropical forest. For instance, as Chapter 7 points out, the above-ground biomass of Gmelina plantations ready for harvest at Jari in Brazil was only a quarter that of the native forest they had replaced (Russell 1983), making nonsense of official claims that the plantations helped alleviate global warming.

A 'message' about the supposed global-warming benefits of plantations is also unlikely to impress audiences who know that plantations are capable of sequestering carbon only temporarily. Even the longest-lasting wood products are unlikely to be able to keep their carbon out of the atmosphere for more than a few decades, while the paper produced from plantations may well be oxidized within months of harvest.

Yet even if plantations could be fashioned that resulted in net sequestration of carbon, and even if they were capable of sequestering it for a meaningful length of time, the sheer scale of the plantations that would be required makes the idea politically and technically impractic-able. According to one estimate, reducing atmospheric CO2 to preindustrial levels would require a plantation capable of producing annually many times the expected global demand for wood (Grainger 1990), or a tree farm 15-20 times the size of Britain. The fact that growth rates in large-scale plantations are always much lower than in test plots suggests that even this may be an underestimate.

Proposing industrial plantations as a meaningful response to global warming, in short, demonstrates a lack of perspective _ particularly given the multitude of more feasible approaches to the problem which are available, including reductions in fossil fuel use and no-cost improved energy efficiency (Rocky Mountain Institute 1990). As even Philip Fearnside (1993), who has some sympathy with the idea of plantations as a part of a solution to global warming, notes, 'plantations are a much less cost-effective means of avoiding net emissions of greenhouse gases than is reduction of tropical deforestation, as well as having many fewer benefits in realms other than global warming abatement'.

The attempt to justify large plantations in the South on the ground that they will alleviate global warming, finally, will be especially ineffective with audiences who question why the South (or, for that matter, poor rural regions of the North) should provide ever-expanding sinks for infinitely-growing industrial carbon dioxide sources in industrialized regions (Barnett 1992, Sargent and Bass 1992, Shell/WWF 1993). Any historically- and scientifically-informed approach to the issue will have to acknowledge that global warming is primarily due to the industrial activities of the North, and that that is where the burden of the main changes necessary for its alleviation must lie.

It is perhaps worth adding that while plantations whose harvest was prohibited might be temporarily useful in mitigating global warming, these are not the sorts of plantations advocated by the pulp and paper industry. In any case, such plantations would eventually cease to be carbon sinks, achieving a rough carbon equilibrium with the atmosphere. Faced with such considerations, some scientists have proposed deep-sixing huge masses of logs under ocean sediments after harvesting them, sequestering their carbon permanently, and then replanting the ground where they had grown, establishing a perpetual carbon sink. Although the elaboration of such techno-fantasies undoubtedly promises years of amusement for boffins, it is unlikely to appeal to pulp and paper industrialists, who would like to use scarce plantation land for quite other purposes.

* Plantations are profitable to local and national economies.

This message, which is frequently floated by governments eager to attract plantation investment, is most effectively used with audiences unaware of the massive subsidies channeled to the industry mentioned in Chapter 5. It would be of little use with a Uruguayan audience (say) which was aware that in that country, government subsidies underwrite roughly half of the expense of establishing pulp plantations, which would be commercially unviable without them.

* Plantations create employment, either directly or indirectly (through transport, pulp and paper industries, and sales).

This argument is also standard among governments promoting plantations, although industry and its consultants are less likely to resort to it now than formerly (Shell/WWF 1993). As Chapter 4 shows, the claim is false. Large plantations generate direct employment mostly at planting and harvest times. In Asia in particular, they tend simultaneously to deprive previous occupants of the land of their former occupations, so net employment trends may well be negative even at this stage. After planting, employment drops off substantially. Growing mechanization is reducing harvest-time jobs even further. In general terms, plantations create much less employment than agriculture, the balance being positive only in extensive, sparsely-populated livestock-raising areas. As for industrial employment, plantations do not always result in the creation of local industries, as in many cases production is aimed at the direct exporting of unprocessed logs. Even where pulp and paper industries are set up, the high degree of mechanization implies few employment opportunities, as Chapter 2 reveals.

* State-of-the-art pulpwood plantations exemplify forestry's Green Revolution in harnessing science and technology to the goal of bringing more people a better life.

This argument, which has been put forward by some corporate technicians, is likely to attract, say, Economist leader-writers rather more than many of those who were at the receiving end of the original agricultural Green Revolution. The Green Revolution succeeded above all in making profits for big business, especially Northern business, who benefited from sales of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and so forth, but devastated many existing ecosystems and societies (George 1988, Shiva 1990). In some ways, the effects of the plantation boom promise to be even more biased than those of the Green Revolution, in that it is focused even more tightly on promoting exports of a cheap raw material _ in this case wood _ at the expense of local peoples and their land. The 'scientific management' which is advertised as a benefit of plantations in reality consists of the ability to produce plants and timber in the shortest space of time and as cheaply as possible, while social and environmental impacts tend to be externalized.

* Promulgating plantation guidelines is the crucial step required to make plantations 'sustainable'; if these principles can be agreed upon by all interested parties, then abuses should be avoidable through a few adjustments to production systems.

This extremely subtle assumption is implicit in, for example, the guidelines formulated by Shell/WWF, the International Timber Trade Organization, the Canadian Pulp and Paper Round Table, the New Zealand Development Assistance Division and the Forestry Stewardship Council, as well as in most eco-labeling schemes (Shell/WWF 1993, Clark 1994, IIED 1995). It is also easily embraced by a wide variety of Northern academics, scientists, technocrats, public relations executives and environmentalists whose history, institutions, and jobs give them incentives for believing that if theory, objectives, or sound legal measures can be formulated 'correctly', even by those who live far from plantation areas, then good practice, implementation or enforcement will follow fairly straightforwardly through the efforts of existing effective, disinterested, benevolent institutions.

Such figures, when interrogated by critics with experience of some of the disastrous effects plantations can bring about in practice, often consider it sufficient simply to disavow responsibility, protesting (for example), 'But that's not the way it's supposed to work in theory', or 'The implementing agencies didn't follow my instructions'. Whether the implementing agencies, or indeed the capitalist systems within which such ideologists and scientists work, have any interest in or capability of following those instructions is frequently considered to be 'not my department'.

Thus one British advertising executive recently accused of making misleading claims for Indonesian forestry in a television advertisement retorted that what actually happens in practice in Indonesia is irrelevant. Evidence of rampant industry deforestation in Indonesia should not disqualify advertisers from saying that forest use there is sustainable, he maintained, any more than the evidence for the existence of drunk drivers in Britain should prevent anyone from saying that drink driving is not allowed there (Brooks 1994). In the same vein, Philip G. Adlard of the Oxford Forestry Institute has responded defensively to documentation of cases in which eucalyptus planting has reduced food production by invoking an irrelevant Cloudcuckooland of contextless markets, uncoerced economic actors, and benevolent state intervention:

If market forces are allowed free play this would result in a rise in price of the local staple foods and a reversal of the trend to grow tree crops for cash benefits in place of food crops needed by the local community. The market price for forest produce (poles and pulpwood) would also lead to checks on the areas planted . . . The farmer has the right to choose whether he grows a cash crop and buys his staple food or grows some or all of his food crop and foregoes possible cash benefits. If market forces do not lead to a balance, or if there are proved ecological reasons for not growing a particular crop, then some form of subsidy may be the best incentive to good land use (Adlard 1993).

Part of what makes such responses so inadequate is the fact that, even in the unlikely case in which principles of plantation management could be formulated which, on paper, respect the claims and desires of people in plantation areas, such principles by themselves turn few cogs in the economic, political and social mechanisms of contemporary industrial capitalism. A number of immense practical difficulties immediately intervene _ all of which, however, tend to be more familiar to activists on the ground than to office- or trial-site-bound environmentalists or technocrats.

One problem is that implementing, enforcing and financing institutions are never 'neutral' and tend either to ignore or to reinterpret management principles as they see fit. Nor do idealized egalitarian social structures of the type Adlard invokes actually exist in the real world. In 1989-90, for example, Shell hired the International Institute for Environment and Development to formulate management recommendations for a proposed plantation operation in Thailand to ensure the project was carried out in a socially and environmentally responsible fashion. Yet, as was obvious to Thai observers from the beginning, there was never any chance that IIED's plan, even if formulated with the best will in the world by the foreign experts responsible for it, could engage with Thai political and social realities in the way advertised or indeed do more than shore up repressive forces while providing a cover for business as usual. A Shell (Thailand) executive charged with implementing the project inadvertently summed up the difficulty when he stated forthrightly that the company would follow those recommend-ations which were 'consistent with profits'.

Similarly, none of the environmental controls recommended by Papua New Guinea government consultants for Japanese corporate pulpwood clearfellings in the Gogol Valley _ which included restrictions on logging coupe size and measures to alternate clearcuts with lightly-logged forest patches _ were ever implemented (Lamb 1990). In a parallel case, Jaakko P"yry's Forest Policy, although explicitly committing the company to maintaining species biodiversity and to advocating that 'any natural forest area which demonstrates untouched unique ecosystems be set aside for conservation even it it has been assigned for industrial forestry', has not prevented the firm from involving itself in (for instance) several enormous projects in Indonesia which are explicitly designed to start up by feeding off mixed tropical hardwoods from native forests (P"yry n.d. e). Multilateral development banks' structural inability to abide by their own guidelines has also been exhaustively documented (Rich 1994, Ferguson 1990).

A second, equally deep problem with promoting plantation guidelines as a solution to plantation problems without investigating their political context concerns information and monitoring. To take one indicative example, B&Q, a large British do-it-yourself outlet which has come under heavy environmentalist pressure due to its sales of tropical timber, has hired staff to audit its wood supplies to ensure they meet rigourous standards of 'sustainability'. Yet in a highly-extended global commercial system, with its myriad, convoluted and difficult-to-trace long-distance transactions among agents many of whom have some vested interest in concealment or prevarication, it has proved hugely difficult in practice to guarantee a 'sustainable' pedigree for many wood products no matter how well-formulated the standards are (Cox 1993). Even more fundamentally, any team of experts sent out to certify that plantation operations in the South are abiding by certain management principles, because it is likely to consist of professionals of a certain class and background, will communicate far more easily and comfortably with corporate and state personnel than with affected rural residents, to understand whose observations might indeed require months or years of cultural immersion. Such experts may not even find time to meet briefly with local people requesting opportunities to pass on critical information, as happened in 1989 in Sarawak when the noted ecologist and conservationist Lord Cranbrook was enlisted by the International Timber Trade Organization to review Malaysian logging practices. The report any such 'certifiers' file after a brief visit will thus inevitably be biased and riddled with gaps.

Participating uncritically, with industry or with others, in efforts to formulate principles or guidelines for plantation management, therefore, runs the risk of merely helping corporate efforts to delay structural change or to provide ideological cover for continued depredation. This is not to deny that, on some occasions, formulating such principles can be one step in a series of actions and arguments which effectively challenge industry practice. Framing principles prohibiting wood from any extensive industrial exotic monoculture from being certified as 'sustainably produced', for example, could be part of a realistic programme to reduce the damage done by such plantations. Nor is there any point in denying that the exercise of formulating such principles can help environmental groups clarify their own viewpoints to themselves. The question of whether negotiating over the content of such principles is a waste of time or not, however, is an empirical one, to be settled by a close and, if necessary, anthropological examination of the social and political context _ including the context of industrial structure and economic centralization _ in which the principles are expected to operate. Such an examination, to be meaningful, must be conducted before negotiations about the principles' content begin, rather than after they are completed.

Conclusion

The 'messages' and assumptions described in this section, deployed selectively and shrewdly, foster the globalization of the pulp and paper industry by helping block alliances between grassroots groups fighting monoculture pulpwood plantations and environmental groups elsewhere. Yet the converse is also true. It is only the global reach of the contemporary pulp and paper industry _ its ability to exploit the spatial and cultural distance between grassroots movements and intelligentsias elsewhere _ that allow it to deploy its mystifications _ 'Trees are good. We need more trees not less' _ to drum up support for industrial tree plantations among largely urban and Northern power bases. This support is crucial, since a ballooning 'free market' in wood fibre, pulp and paper can be constructed and coordinated only if the subsidies given to consultants, foresters, aid agencies, and non-governmental organizations to promote plantations can be justified before a large and diffuse public.

To use such mystifications, however, is always to gamble that they will not be exposed. Whether that gamble pays off _ whether the pulp and paper industry gains its 'freedom to plant' at the expense of the people directly affected _ depends largely on the skill in intercultural conversation of plantation opponents. The prospects are far from hopeless. In a world thronged with naked emperors, paper industry figures claiming sustainable environmental benefits for large-scale monoculture pulpwood plantations are more notable than most for their sartorial minimalism.