Large-Scale Tree Plantations

Seldom are there news arriving from Liberia. This country, located in the West African region, with shores on the Atlantic Ocean and bounded in the West by Sierra Leone, Guinea in the North and Ivory Coast in the East, ranks amongst the world’s poorest countries and bears the weight of a huge foreign debt. An accelerated process of environmental degradation -including forests- is also affecting the country. Several activities -as mining, plantations and logging- are destroying the dense tropical rainforests.

To the reductionist viewpoint of Western silviculture, forests are mainly -if not exclusively- a source of roundwood for industrial purposes. Nevertheless, forests are not only the home for thousands of indigenous people in different regions of the world, but also a rich source of different goods -wood included- and services. Medicinal plants are one of such valuable products which indigenous people use in traditional medical practices.

The expansion of the tree plantation model in South Africa has given place to a heated debate. Philip Owen, from SAWAC (South African Water Crisis), as well as several other concerned people, have repeatedly argued that the plantations scheme is detrimental to grassland and water conservation, thus negative with regard to rural communities.

Corruption and incapacity among forestry officials, as well as the activity of illegal loggers, timber product dealers and sawmillers are responsible for the disappearance and degradation of Tanzania's forests (see WRM Bulletins 27 and 29). This not only means the destruction of a valuable ecosystem in a tropical region but also the loss of the source of resources and incomes for forest dwellers and forest dependent people.

Uncontrolled logging threatens the future of Cambodian forests. A review of logging concessions in Cambodia was initiated last year, with the aim of identifying those concessions which should be terminated due to their repeated legal infringements, and those which should be continued under new contracts. The initiative, which was funded by the Asia Development Bank (ADB), has been crippled by time and financial constraints resulting from shortcomings in the ADB's management process.

Borneo, one of the biggest islands of the Malaysian archipelago in South East Asia, is under the sovereignty of three states: Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. Originally this big island was completely covered by dense tropical forests. The expansion of the lumber-exporting industry, together with oil palm and pulpwood plantations both in Malaysia and Indonesia have nearly completely destroyed the Bornean forests. Consumers of tropical timbers in the North, such as buyers of plywood for home building in the USA are ultimately responsible for this ecological disaster.

In February 1998, representatives of indigenous communities -Sumus and Miskitos- local and regional authorities, environmental NGOs, and community and religious leaders joined in Rosita, a village on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, to discuss a common strategy against the illegal activities of the Korean transnational logging company Kimyung, which in 1994 had received a concession from the central government on 62,000 hectares of forest in indigenous territories (see WRM bulletin 11). Kimyung operated through the subsidiary SOLCARSA.

The issue of the environmental services that Southern countries can provide to Northern countries to mitigate the effects of global climate change is controversial. On the one hand there is the question of environmental justice at the global level, since those countries that are most responsible for the dangerous alteration of climate on Earth, instead of addressing the causes that are provoking it -for instance the unsustainable energy use and the huge emissions of CO2 by industry- are looking for doubtful and partial solutions, that can be bought for a low price in the South.

The accelerated loss of the Amazon rainforest is perhaps the most notorious case of environmental destruction at a global level. It is not "humanity" as an abstract entity the one responsible for it. A research on forestry policy performed by the Brazilian National Security Agency (SAE) in 1998 concluded that 80% of the timber produced in the Amazon was extracted illegally. Powerful transnational companies were and are direct agents of this devastating activity (see WRM Bulletin 5).

Environmental NGOs are celebrating the success of the newly elected New Zealand government in forcing the State owned logging company, Timberlands, to withdraw its plans to log extensive areas of beech rainforests on the west coast of the country's south island.

The Papua New Guinea (PNG) Prime Minister Mekere Morauta has announced the intention of the new government to impose a moratorium on new logging, and to review existing logging concessions, many of which are thought to have been improperly granted and implemented. The announcement was well received by environmental NGOs, which consider that it is time to halt any new large-scale logging concessions in the country.

The increasing demand of paper and paperboard, especially in Northern countries, is one of the direct causes of deforestation and, at the same time, of the expansion of pulpwood plantations -which normally constitute an additional cause of deforestaton- for the obtention of fibre. Paper production and consumption at the global level has reached such alarming figures, that this industry has become one of the most resource-demanding and polluting industries in the world.