Plantations, poverty and power - Critical Information Collective

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immune system damage and skin diseases.
Before Celulosa Arauco y Constitución (CELCO) built the Valdivia pulp mill the Cruces River wetlands
were home to about 6,000 black necked swans. Pollution from the mill killed hundreds of black necked
swans. The company denies that it is responsible, but the evidence is against the company. “They should
have never built the plant there in first place,” a World Bank consultant said at an industry conference in
Brazil in May 2006. 14
In September 2007, the Chilean State Defence Council (CDE) filed a US$3.9 million lawsuit against
CELCO for the company’s pollution of another river, after 20,000 cubic metres of untreated industrial
waste was released from CELCO’s Licancel pulp mill. The waste water polluted the Matauito River,
where it resulted in the death of thousands of fish. 15
Pollution from Asia Pulp and Paper’s Indah Kiat pulp mill in Sumatra has killed the fish in the Siak
River, destroying the livelihood of people living along the river. A few years ago, German film-maker
Inge Altemeier travelled with Trabani Rab, a medical professor who has been monitoring the impacts of
Indah Kiat’s mill on villagers’ health for several years. In two days of visiting villages on the Siak River,
he diagnosed more than 500 cases of serious skin diseases. 16
It is not only in the South that pulp mills are polluting. In 2005, World Rainforest Movement’s
international coordinator, Ricardo Carrere, visited Finland to find out for himself just how clean pulp
production in Finland actually is. While the pulp industry is not as polluting as it once was, neither it is by
any means pollution-free. In 2003, 7,500 cubic metres of black liquor leaked from UPM’s Kaukas pulp
mill into Lake Saimaa. Within a few days the black liquor had spread far into the lake. Half of the fish
biomass in the lake was wiped out in a three-kilometre radius area from the pulp mill. 17
Leonel’s presentation is just one example of the propaganda produced by the pulp and paper industry to
justify its expansion in the global South. To explain why the industry is so keen on expanding in the
South, we need to look at some of the processes and actors involved in promoting industrial tree
plantations.
Building the political framework
In many countries in the global South, the first step towards building the political framework for a
massive expansion of the pulp and paper sector was a national forestry plan. Many of these were written
as part of the Tropical Forestry Action Plan which was established in the mid-1980s, as the world became
increasingly concerned about the fate of the tropical forests. Set up by the World Bank, the United
14 The consultant was Neil McCubbin and he said this in May 2006 at RISI’s Latin American Pulp and Paper Outlook
Conference in Brazil. http://pulpinc.wordpress.com/2006/10/02/world-bank-consultant-says-celcos-valdivia-mill-shouldnever-have-been-built-there/
15 “CDE sues Celco for Licancel plant contamination”, BNamericas.com, 11 September 2007.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2007/09/11/2929455.htm
16 Chris Lang (2005) “Indonesia: The health impacts of living near Indah Kiat’s pulp and paper mills”, WRM Bulletin no. 97,
August 2005. http://chrislang.org/2005/08/27/indonesia-the-health-impacts-of-living-near-indah-kiats-pulp-and-papermills/
17 Ricardo Carrere (2005) “On the pulp trial in Finland: the other side of the coin”, Group Guayubira, June 2005.
http://www.guayubira.org.uy/celulosa/Finlandia.html