Large-Scale Tree Plantations

The main aim of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is the conservation and sustainable use of the world’s biological diversity. It would thus seem obvious that anything that threatens biodiversity should be adequately addressed by signatories to the convention.

The certifying firm SGS has launched a consultation process for the FSC certification of Veracel Celulose’s eucalyptus plantations. This company is owned by the Swedish-Finnish company Stora Enso and the Norwegian-Brazilian company Aracruz Celulose and its plantations are established on 78,000 hectares of land in the extreme south of the State of Bahia. The negative impacts of those plantations are resulting in considerable local resistance (see Bulletin No. 109). The main assessment will be made between 23 and 27 July 2007.

With much song and dance, Agro-fuels have quickly found a place on the agendas of the governments of the North…and of the South. They promise energy independence, business, a solution to global warming, business, more foreign currency, business!!!

To the disappointment of some and the relief of others, tree plantation projects, particularly those involving large-scale monocultures, have been struggling to access a new subsidy offered by the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism: in the three years since the rules for afforestation and reforestation projects were adopted, and after twelve rounds of baseline methodology submissions, only one plantation, in China, has been registered as a CDM project.

Registered on last January 22, the “Project 0143 : UTE Barreiro S.A. Renewable Electricity Generation Project” of Vallourec & Mannesmann (V&M), the world's largest manufacturer of seamless hot-rolled steel tubes, is the third try of the company to get funds under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) scheme. The registered project will provide V&M with 67954 carbon credits it can sell to companies in the North who prefer buying such carbon credits to reducing emissions at home.

More and more the rush to use biomass as an alternative source of energy allegedly to reduce CO2 emissions is concealing the unsustainable consumption pattern that underlies global warming and climate change. Reduccionist approaches focus on solutions which create even greater harm. That is the case of a major European project which has enthusiastically identified industrial-scale eucalyptus plantations as an answer for so said less polluting steel manufacturing processes.

Through various programmes and state incentives, under the auspices of international cooperation agencies, monoculture tree plantations of fast growing species have been established in the three continental regions of Ecuador and are rapidly becoming widespread, generally destroying primary ecosystems.

Members of twenty-five Indonesian NGOs and community organisations met in Riau, Sumatra, on 13th January 2007, to give voice to their serious concerns about the impacts of the pulp and paper industry and its fastwood plantations on people and forests.

The web page http://www.southafrica.info, published for the International Marketing Council of South Africa, included in March an article which stated that “South Africa has identified the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces as key for development in the forestry, wood and paper sector, with reforestation a vital part of the strategy”. For those who don’t know the forestry language, it is important to note that in South Africa the word “reforestation” really means planting vast monocultures of alien tree species on native grassland ecosystems.

Advance Agro is one of Thailand's largest pulp and paper companies, producing 427,000 tonnes of pulp and 470,000 tonnes of paper a year. The company markets its "Double A" brand of photocopy paper with a series of environmental claims. In May 2007, an Australian company called Access Economics added to these claims with a report titled "Environmental Benefits of Double A Paper".

The entrance to the bank has nothing to do with human scale. Built of steel and glass, the building towers over visitors like a spotlessly cleaned, giant machine. A machine for swallowing people and making money, perhaps.

Forest conservation is back on the international climate agenda…big time! More and more Northern and Southern governments, bilateral development agencies, multilateral development banks and big conservation NGOs are arguing that “countries” should be compensated for protecting the “carbon reservoirs” in standing forests. Under some plans, Southern governments’ forest protection plans would generate pollution rights that the governments could then sell to Northern industries to allow them to continue business as usual.