Plantations, poverty and power - Critical Information Collective

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Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and World
Resources Institute the TFAP proved to be a bonanza for forestry consultants, but did little or nothing to
prevent the destruction of the forests. On the contrary, it helped accelerate forest destruction.
The TFAP for Cameroon, for example, aimed to turn the country into Africa’s biggest timber exporter,
with plans for 600 kilometres of roads to open up 14 million hectares of forest in south-eastern
Cameroon. The TFAP ignored indigenous people rights and made no mention of any socio-economic
issues.18
TFAP was top-down and had a bias towards investment in commercial forestry. TFAP ignored the root
causes of deforestation, such as large scale industrial development plans for dams, roads, mines, oil
exploration and plantations. In fact, in many countries TFAP recommended expanding the area of
industrial tree plantations and building new pulp mills.
The TFAP received a barrage of criticism from concerned observers, including the World Rainforest
Movement. 19 Partly as a result of the criticism, the TFAP wasted away and TFAP reports gathered dust
on the shelves of forestry departments around the global South.
But the TFAP was not a failure for the many consulting firms that took part in the process. They were
given a valuable insight into how the forestry departments and governments of countries in the South
worked. Once established, consulting firms did what they are best at doing: recommending projects on
which they can win further contracts. While there may or may not be a memo from head office
demanding that the staff of consulting firms “go out and find pulp mills to build”, a consultant working
for a company that employs a team of highly paid pulp mill engineers who recommends establishing
industrial tree plantations in, say, Uruguay, will bring in further contracts for the company and will
progress rapidly up the career ladder. Even though the consultant may be fully aware of the problems
caused by the pulp industry’s tree plantations, the mitigating measures that he or she proposes will require
a series of further studies to make sure that they are properly carried out. More benefits to the consulting
firm, in other words. Whether these mitigating measures are actually undertaken (or even whether they
could be undertaken, given the political and social complexities of the area in which the plantations and
pulp project is planned) is beside the point. The consulting firm has suggested a series of mitigating
measures, and company staff can always argue that if only the mitigating measures had been implemented
according to plan then the project would have benefited local people.
Once the pulp mill has been built a new series of opportunities opens up for consultants to monitor the
pulp mill and to discover new, previously not thought of, problems – with, of course, new
recommendations for more studies to resolve these problems.
The largest and most notorious of these consulting firms is Finland-based Pöyry. Section 3 looks in more
detail at Pöyry’s activities in promoting the expansion of the pulp industry in the global South.
The pulp industry’s move to the South
18 Korinna Horta (2008) “Forests and Climate Change”, presentation given during the UN Climate Change talks in Accra,
Ghana, 18-20 August 2008.
19 See, for example, Larry Lohmann and Marcus Colchester (1990) “Paved with good intentions: TFAP’s road to oblivion”,
The Ecologist, Vol. 20, No. 3, May-June 1990.