Large-Scale Tree Plantations

The dispossession, deforestation and pollution caused by the pulp and paper industry is tied to a dynamic of ever-increasing scale, concentration and capital intensiveness which has characterized the industry since the Industrial Revolution. Crucial to this dynamic are attempts by the industry and its allies to refashion the political and physical infrastructure through which they work, capturing subsidies, managing demand, centralizing power, and evading, digesting and regulating resistance.

Pulp mills’ extremely large scale makes it necessary for them to simplify under a central authority not only landscapes, biological diversity and genetic diversity, but also political systems. The sheer size of the mills and the landscape they reorganize around them means that to survive, they need constantly to attract subsidies, stimulate demand – and above all, control resistance, both from ordinary people and from the landscape.

Ashis Nandy, the Indian psychologist and social critic, once defined progress as "growth in the awareness of oppression". What he meant, in part, is that we are fortunate that due to the rise of feminist movements we are more aware of the way women have been exploited than formerly, that due to anti-racist struggles we are clearer about many of the ways of oppression, and that due to the long hours radical scholars put in at their libraries we understand economic exploitation better.

The present scenario, where most countries have become mere markets for an increasingly reduced group of powerful corporations that share them between themselves while keeping up a network of commercial links --for which they want to have more and more elbow room--, has also been built up with language and the introduction of concepts that are imposed as truths.

Making clean white paper from trees is a dirty business. To make bleached kraft pulp, trees are chipped, cooked under pressure, washed and then bleached. Toxic chemicals are used in the cooking process to remove lignin, a glue-like substance that holds wood cells together and makes trees strong. As lignin causes yellowing of paper, any lignin remaining has to be bleached.

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

Since 1990, logging companies, rebel groups, criminal networks, various interim governments and the regime of former president Charles Taylor have colluded to plunder Liberia’s natural resources. During this period the timber sector witnessed a plethora of illegal activities and practices. Logging companies operated in rebel held territories without any form of regulation from the Forestry Development Authority; none of the revenue generated during this period benefited the Liberian people.

We have just received the good news that on Friday, 21 May, Floresmilo Villalta regained his freedom and immediately travelled to the community of Las Golondrinas to be reunited with his family and friends. Representatives of the Ecuadorian NGO Acción Ecológica made know their gratefulness, on behalf of Floresmilo, for the “incredible response” to the international campaign organized in favour of the 63-year old peasant, whose only “crime” was to try to defend the forests of his region against timber exploitation by the powerful BOTROSA company.

Pulp and paper production in Kenya is presently dominated by one firm, Pan African Paper Mills (Panpaper), which is a joint venture between the Kenyan Government, the World Bank’s private investment arm International Finance Corporation (IFC), and Orient Paper Mills, part of the Birhla group from India. The pulp mill was established in 1974 and is based in Webuye town, with a population of some 60,000 people, on the banks of the Nzoia River which drains into Lake Victoria.

‘Pulping the South’ by Larry Lohmann and Ricardo Carrere was a watershed publication for many groups and individuals around the world. Concerned people had been aware of many issues and problems associated with the expansion of industrial monoculture tree plantations in Southern countries, but it was this WRM publication that made the world sit up with a jolt.

Since 1996, in an attempt to control pollution, China's State Environmental Protection Administration has closed thousands of pulp and paper mills. "A significant portion of urban as well as rural water pollution problems came from industry and, in particular, the pulp and paper industry," commented the World Bank in a 2000 report about China's pulp and paper industry.

In the early 1980s the Indonesian government launched an ambitious forestry plan entitled "Industrial Timber Plantation (HTI) and Pulp Industry Development." In the early stages of its development, pulpwood plantations were claimed to rehabilitate degraded land and to reduce the pressure on natural forests. This misleading propaganda was indeed intended to disguise an ambitious plan of the Indonesian government for the country to become a world major pulp and paper producer.