Plantations, poverty and power - Critical Information Collective

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which require half as much wood as typical stoves in Uganda. New Forests Company’s website includes
photographs of road building, bush clearing and chemical spraying in preparation for the company’s
plantations.576 There is no mention on the website of how much carbon is released to the atmosphere as
a result of these operations. New Forests Company plans to invest US$80 million in plantations in
Uganda, to provide biomass for power generation and timber for the construction industry. The company
is working with another UK company, Aldwych International, which has a license to build a 50 MW
biomass plant in Uganda.577
CIFOR notes that EIB is “happy to focus on macro benefits such as balance of payments improvement,
job creation and as yet do not work actively to mitigate any potential impacts that their investments might
have.”578 This is an understatement, as the Bank’s loans to Veracel and other egregious projects
dramatically illustrate. The Bank has neither the capacity nor the interest to even attempt to deal with the
negative impacts of its loans.
Friends of the Earth International ends its 2006 report on the EIB with a series of recommendations for
the EIB, one of which would exclude “support for projects that are inherently incoherent with poverty
alleviation and sustainability”. The four NGOs involved in writing the report specifically recommend that
the Bank should not fund any large scale industrial tree plantations.579
576 The New Forests Company website: http://www.newforestscompany.com/
577 “NFC to invest up to $80 million in reforestation-for-energy project in Uganda”, Biopact, 29 January 2008.
http://biopact.com/2008/01/nfc-to-invest-up-to-80-million-in.html
578 Machteld Spek (2006) “Financing pulp mills: an appraisal of risk assessment and safeguard procedures”, Center for
International Forestry Research (CIFOR), page 26. http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/publications/pdf_files/Books/BSpek0601.pdf
579 Jaroslava Colajacomo (2006) “The EIB in the South: In whose interest”,Friends of the Earth International,
Campagna per la Riforma Banca Mondiale, CEE Bankwatch Network, World Economy, Ecology and Development,
January 2006, page 41.
I wrote the section about Veracel’s pulp mill in the report.