Industrial Tree Plantations: a Growing Problem

Introduction

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.).

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...