Large-Scale Tree Plantations

The rural-urban migratory process in Chile is the result of internal conflicts in the agrarian structure and, in the case of the VIII Region – the Bio-Bio Region – it is linked to a productive restructuring which is in fact forestry restructuring.

The state-owned company Perhutani boasts of having “one of the highest percentages of forest plantation in the world” (http://perhutaniproducts.com/) with a land area of 2,426,206 Ha in Java and Madura Island of Indonesia. It has also the gloomy record of having severely damaged or destroyed well over half the 'state forest' of Wonosobo in Central Java (see WRM Bulletin Nº 96).

The Tanoé Swamps Forest, in the department of Adiaké, is the very last remaining forest block in the south-eastern corner of Côte d’Ivoire and extends in an area that has been classified by conservation experts as being, among other things, of high importance for the conservation of mammals and birds, and of very high importance for the conservation of fresh water ecosystems.

In February 2008, the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the Uganda People's Defense Forces evicted more than 4,000 people from the Benet and Ndorobo communities living in Mount Elgon National Park in East Uganda. People's houses and crops were destroyed, cattle were confiscated and the people were left homeless. They found shelter where they could: in caves and under trees. The luckier ones stayed in a primary school or moved in with their relatives.

In 1989, WRM and Sahabat Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth) produced the publication “The Battle for Sarawak’s Forests”, which documented not only the destruction of forests and forest peoples’ livelihoods in Sarawak, but also the local resistance process, which included major road blockades established as from 1987 by local communities for stopping the entry of logging trucks into their territories.

“Paper is a wonderful material, which for centuries has served for a fertile exchange of ideas among human beings. For us all who use it as an essential vehicle to share what we think, imagine, dream, know or believe we know, paper is a wonderful tool that we want to be able to continue using ... but not at the expense of people and the environment. As people who live in this reality, we are aware of the serious injustices and inequalities - social and environmental – arising from the world production and consumption of paper.

Paper is a material many people in industrialised countries take entirely for granted. Millions of trees are felled, pulped, made into paper, printed on, then binned without even being read. Why is it that we treat cotton, linen and other fabrics made from plant fibres with great respect – laundering them carefully, even mending them when they tear – yet we toss barely used sheets of paper into the rubbish bin that are pulped from trees, the oldest living organisms on the planet?

Since the early 1960s, world consumption of paper and paperboard has increased by almost seven times. Every year, each person in the UK gets through an average of more than 200 kilogrammes of paper. In the US the figure is almost 300 kilogrammes. Global paper consumption is massively inequitable. In Laos, for example, people use on average less than one kilogramme of paper a year. Yet rural communities in Laos are currently faced with the rapid expansion of eucalyptus plantations to meet the global paper industry's demands for raw material.

"When I use a word," said Humpty Dumpty to Alice, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." Welcome to the Looking-Glass World. Not that of Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass", but that of the Confederation of European Paper Industries. CEPI represents 800 pulp and paper companies in 18 European countries, producing more than one-quarter of world paper production.

World hunger is a source of ever greater concern for those who have yet to suffer from it, and ever greater suffering for those who already do – and who are growing in numbers year after year. Yet the policies being formulated in the global power centres not only do little to solve the problem of hunger, but actually tend to even further exacerbate it.

Agrofuels are increasingly drawing words of warning, protest and condemnation from such disparate voices as high-level United Nations representatives like FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf and Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler, statesmen like Fidel Castro, and social organizations in both the North and South (see notes 1 and 2). Nevertheless, plantations of crops raised specifically to produce fuel continue to spread.

The expansion of large-scale plantations --either crops or trees-- for the production of liquid agrofuels such as bioethanol and biodiesel is increasing in many Southern countries –with harmful impacts on people and the environment. Now, even the FAO admits the risks. A recently published FAO report looks into agrofuel production and their gendered impacts, explaining that it may increase the marginalization of women in rural areas, threatening their livelihoods.