Large-Scale Tree Plantations

Large-scale rubber, oil palm, eucalyptus and pine tree plantations are being promoted by governments in Cambodia, China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. However, affected villagers are openly protesting against them. At a meeting held last month in Cambodia we learned that local communities are strongly opposing these plans because they see that these plantations are encroaching on their lands and impacting on their livelihoods.

“During our time together, we heard directly from local community representatives from twelve provinces in Cambodia and also from other countries in the region about how their lives, livelihoods and environments are affected by large plantations in their respective areas.”

In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol was formalized within the United Nations Convention on Climate Change to limit carbon emissions causing global warming. Although since then the situation has become more acute due to the accelerated impacts of climate change, during the Conferences talk mainly addresses the “opportunities” of this catastrophe, understood as business.

Carbon forestry projects made a late start in the CDM market because they are so controversial. The necessary legal framework, laid out in the Marrakesh accords of 2001, was agreed only in late 2005 at the Montreal climate negotiations. So there is little concrete to point to yet.

Since 1994, a Dutch organisation called the FACE Foundation has been working at Mount Elgon National Park. FACE works with the Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA) which is responsible for the management of national parks in Uganda. The UWA-FACE project aims to plant trees on an area of 25,000 hectares just inside the border of the national park. So far UWA-FACE has planted 8,500 hectares. Under the contract with UWA, the FACE Foundation owns the carbon in the trees planted at Mount Elgon and the trees must not be cut down for at least 99 years.

A few days ago, the 12th session of the Conference of the Parties on Climate Change – COP 12 – came to an end. The closing session confirmed the scant will of governments and parties in seeking real solutions to the climate crisis. However what did stand out was interest in promoting the use of strategies invented to solve the climate problem based on market mechanisms. Among these, the group of tree plantation projects as greenhouse gas sinks were the most notorious.

In 2003, a committee of the 9th Conference of the Parties (COP 9) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Milan, established that GE trees could be used within the so called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in plantations created to allegedly offset the carbon emissions from factories in the industrialized North.

Peru is one of the few South American countries where large scale monoculture tree plantations have not yet been introduced; however the government is seeking to promote their expansion. In fact the country already has a “2005-2024 National Reforestation Plan” [National Plan] and also a “Law for the promotion of private investment in afforestation and/or reforestation” [Forestation Law], the basic tools to make tree plantations justifiable and feasible.

Today [December 12], hundreds of indigenous people from the seven Tupinikim and Guarani communities in the state of Espirito Santo, Brazil, occupied the harbor Portocel, from where the cellulose of the company Aracruz Celulose is being exported to Europe, the USA and Asia.

In response to timber industry efforts to expand the area of land under industrial timber plantations by 600,000 hectares, a Plantations Campaign was started by a small group of NGOs in South Africa in 1995.

“All villagers understand the need to protect the forest. We can't live without it.” The speaker is a villager from Dak Dam Commune in Mondulkiri province in the north-east of Cambodia. “Now our life is more difficult,” he said.

In July 2004, a business delegation from the Vietnam General Rubber Corporation visited Laos. At the time only a small area was planted with rubber in the south of Laos. “We can provide 50,000-100,000 hectares of land for Vietnam to grow rubber,” Thongloun Sisolit, the Lao Deputy Prime Minister, told the delegation.