Uruguay

The Department of Rio Negro, located in the western side of Uruguay, presently has 70,510 hectares of plantations (mainly eucalyptus) which makes it one of the Departments having more tree monocultures in the country.

The FAO is portrayed by many as the expert body on forests. One single example will suffice to question FAO's alleged expertise. The organization's web page includes a "country profile" area containing the basic data on the countries' forest resources and we would recommend everyone to compare what the FAO says with what they know about their own country. In the case of Uruguay, the FAO says:

For more than 10 years Uruguay has been implementing an unsustainable forestry model, substituting its natural prairie ecosystems with large-scale eucalyptus and pine tree plantations.

Last November we received a message from the Tasmania based NGO Native Forest Network-Southern Hemisphere (NFN), informing that the Australian giant North Ltd. was planning to invest in pulpwood plantations in Uruguay.

Every time we visit an area covered with large scale monoculture tree plantations we find local people faced with the same or very similar problems. In Thailand and Chile, in Brazil or Venezuela. And each time we find foresters denying that those problems even exist.

The giant US-based Weyerhaeuser Business employs 2,300 people and manages 5.3 million acres of private forests in the United States. Additionally Weyerhaeuser Canada manages 27 million acres of publicly owned forestland through long-term licenses in western Canada. Weyerhaeuser owns a majority interest in 193,000 acres of tree plantations in New Zealand. and 62,500 acres in Australia. In spite of trumpeting itself as being very committed to the environment, the company has got a sad record concerning its environmental performance worldwide.

Growing opposition to monoculture tree plantations has forced the forestry sector to respond to NGO claims that this type of forestry model is detrimental to the environment and that it does not benefit the country or its people. They chose to use "science" as a weapon to counteract such claims.

A call for action to defend forests and people against large-scale tree monocrops- In June 1998, citizens of 14 countries around the world gathered in Montevideo, Uruguay out of urgent concern at the recent and accelerating invasion of millions of hectares of land and forests by pulpwood, oil palm, rubber and other industrial tree plantations.

The situation in Uruguay, where Parliament unanimously passed a forestry law in 1987 to promote industrial tree plantations with almost no opposition from civil society organizations, has radically changed since then. In spite of almost total governmental and academic support to eucalyptus and pine tree plantations, NGO-led opposition has totally changed the scenario. As informed in Bulletin nr 3, the WRM secretariat facilitated the creation of an NGO coalition (the Guayubira Group), which has since been at the centre of a number of anti-plantation and anti pulp mill activities.

The World Rainforest Movement is organizing a plantations campaign meeting which will be held in Montevideo on 20-22 June. The aim of the meeting is to discuss and decide a common strategy for the campaign and to agree on a plan of action. The campaign will be officially launched at the end of the meeting.

Concern for the environmental consequences of the forestry schemes applied in Uruguay is growing all over the country. The planned installation of a pulp and paper mill in the small city of Fray Bentos, on the River Uruguay coast, has raised a wave of protest. This fact is impressive since the unemployment rate in that city is particularly high.