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Industrial tree plantations: a growing problem (*) By Ricardo Carrere Industrial tree
plantations are becoming a growing problem for people and the environment. For a number of
years, the World Rainforest Movement has been researching and campaigning on this issue
and will launch a coordinated campaign later this year. The present article aims at trying
to involve South Africans -who for well known reasons have been more or less isolated from
the outside world- in a worldwide campaign on the plantation model prevailing in this and
many other Southern countries. Tree deserts in the South Tree plantations are
neither good nor bad in themselves: it depends on their scale, their aimed objective and
the type of plantations, as well as on the natural and socioeconomic environment where
they are implemented. The type of plantations which are becoming a growing problem are
characterized by their large scale and uniformity. At the national level, they consist of
scores of thousands of hectares -and in cases such as Chile, South Africa, Brazil and
Indonesia, surpassing a million hectares- of tree monocultures. Such plantations are based
on some few species -usually eucalyptus or pines- bred for rapid growth, uniformity and
high yield of raw material. Planted in even-aged stands, they require intensive
preparation of the soil, fertilization, regular spacing of trees, seedling selection,
mechanical or chemical weeding, use of pesticides and mechanized harvesting in short
rotations. These vast monocultures
are increasingly being promoted in the South, where inexpensive land, low labout costs and
fast tree growth combine to make wood especially cheap. As these extensive plantations
begin to invade native grasslands, agricultural lands and forests the results, in country
after oountry, have been impoverishment, environmental degradation and growing local
opposition. From Chile to Portugal, from Brazil to Indonesia, from Uruguay to Spain, from
South Africa to New Zealand, from India to Thailand, people are organizing to oppose what
they have called tree deserts, green cancer, green invading army, selfish trees or
socioeconomic deserts. Why the plantation boom? Tree monocrops are not
the result of a locally expressed need nor are they meant to favour local people. Their
real aim is to ensure the global paper industry with cheap raw material for an ever
increasing overconsumption of paper and paper products, particularly in the North. As
northern forests are depleted as a result of the paper industry’s growing demand for
wood fibers, and as the northern environmental movement becomes stronger in its defense of
the remnants of old-growth forests, the industry is moving its future supply to the South. A number of different
actors are making this shift possible. Multilateral Development Banks,”aid”
agencies, northern consultants, technology suppliers, state investment and export credit
agencies are among the main external actors which provide the impetus and the financial
and technical support for the spread of plantations all over the world. Internally,
national governments -pushed by the above-said external actors- provide a number of overt
or hidden subsidies which allow these plantations to be implemented. Such subsidies may be
direct (e.g. payment of a large percentage of the plantation cost, tax breaks, etc.) or
indirect (e.g. government forestry research, road and port infrastructure, soft loans,
etc.). Are plantations good for
the environment? “Trees are
good” and “we are planting forests” are arguments widely publicized by
plantation proponents to confuse the public. However, these plantations are not forests
but crops, and they are not only crops but large-scale, rapid growth tree monocrops. Such
characterists result firstly in impacts on water. All plants function as water pumps: soil
nutrients reach the leaves dissolved in water. The faster the growth, the bigger the plant
and the larger the area they occupy, the more water they will consume. Such is the case of
these industrial tree plantations. South Africa is probably the only country in the world
where all actors (from industry to NGOs) agree that plantations produce an important
impact on water. In most of the other countries, forestry “experts” deny this
fact, even when local people denounce the depletion of water resources. A second environmental
impact relates to soils. Plantation trees and management result in changes in soil
structure and chemical composition. Short term rotations, coupled with the use of heavy
machinery expose the soil to erosion. Important amounts of nutrients are exported with the
removal of logs. Changes in soil flora and fauna resulting from the chosen plantation tree
species -usually eucalyptus and pines- imply changes in the nutrient cycle and even in the
original soil structure. Many of these changes are irreversible. Thirdly, large-scale
plantations impact on local ecosystems and their native flora and fauna. For the majority
of local wildlife, plantations don’t provide neither food nor shelter nor
opportunities for reproduction. The few species which manage to survive can become pests,
either to the plantations themselves or to other local productions. The impacts are not
restricted to the plantation area (where they are obviously more intense, particularly on
local flora which tends to disappear completely), but can have devastating effects on
other related regional ecosystems such as grasslands, wetlands and water courses. More problems at the
local level All the above
environmental problems also impact directly on local communities, that will have less
available water resources for their crops, cattle and homes, less soils available for
their productive activities and less free access to local plant and animal resources which
provide food, medicine, fodder, fuel, building materials and many other goods. Industrial plantations
also bring about further problems, among which perhaps one of the main ones is the
expulsion of rural people to make way for large plantations. These people can either
become plantation workers (usually seasonal and casual labour where working conditions
vary from bad to terrible) or migrate to the cities’ shanty towns, because
plantations create less jobs than the agricultural activities which they substitute.
Large-scale plantation companies also bring about important changes in the local power
balance because of their economic strength and become the main decision-makers in whole
regions. Nationally, dependence on a commodity such as this (be it pulpwood, chips or
pulp), subject to wild tumbles in price, implies following the same path as with previous
export commodities such as sugar, cotton or coffee, which have had disastrous economic,
social and environmental effects in many southern countries. This new export commodity,
promoted all over the South, offers no assurance that what happened with the former will
not happen again with this one: overproduction followed by price falls. Stop industrial
plantations! South Africa is an
excellent example -though there are many others- to show that plantations are not aimed at
ameliorating local peoples’ quality of life. In a country such as this, where a third
of the population depends on firewood as their main source of energy, the 1.5 million
hectares of tree plantations are not aimed at supplying people with this basic need but
increasingly at exporting logs, chips or pulp to foreign consumers. People in Thailand,
Uruguay, South Africa, Portugal, Malaysia, Mexico, Indonesia, Hawaii, Brazil, Congo,
Phillipines and many others are joining their struggles to put a stop on this socially and
environmentally unsustainable forestry model. The struggle is not against any particular
tree species or against other forms of locally-approved tree plantations. It is against an
industrial model which only serves the interests of a few against the basic needs of the
majority. For more details about all these
struggles see Tree Plantations: impacts and struggles (LINK
http://www.wrm.org.uy/english/plantations/material/bookplantations.htm ) (*) Published in the Environmental Justice
Networking Forum (South Africa), Winter 1997
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