Plantations, poverty and power - Critical Information Collective

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Campaigners in Tasmania and Japan succeeded in persuading Japanese importers of wood chips from
Tasmania not to use wood chips from old-growth forests. As a result, exports of wood chips from
Tasmania to Japan have dropped in recent years. However, the decrease in exports from Tasmania is
matched by an increase in exports to Japan of wood chips from industrial tree plantations in South Africa.
The pulp and paper industry’s global demand for cheap wood fibre has shifted the destruction from
Tasmania’s old-growth forests to South Africa’s grasslands.
Government regulation of pollution from pulp mills is often less stringent in the South. Standards in
countries in the North are “essentially the same”, according to International Paper’s Thomas Jorling, who
has spent almost 30 years working in the paper industry. “There are differences, however, in some of the
developing countries where they don’t have regulations yet for some types of substances that Westernized
countries do,” he said in a 2004 interview, with Paper Watch. 33
An important difference, for example, is the length of time it can take to get government permission to
build a massive new pulp mill. “Permits can be achieved in a much more rapid time outside the U.S.,”
says Jorling. “The average time now for a major capital permit in the U.S. is three years, whereas in
Europe it’s probably six months and in Brazil it’s a couple of weeks. In those countries, you don’t tie up
capital waiting for permits.” 34
Subsidies and dictatorships
“Land is cheap in both Brazil and Chile, generous government subsidies encourage reforestation (sic),
and trees grow faster there than almost anywhere else in the world,” explained an article in the Financial
Times in 1992. 35 In several countries, these “generous government subsidies” were implemented under
military dictatorships or extremely repressive regimes. In addition to financial subsidies, the use of force
by governments to remove local people from their land is a subsidy little discussed by the industry itself,
for obvious reasons.
In Thailand, a massive expansion of industrial tree plantations was planned in the late 1980s, by an
alliance of the pulp and paper industry, the Royal Forestry Department and the army. The Green Isaan
Project started in 1987, which included plans for the army to solve the drought problems in north-east
Thailand by building dams and “regreening” by planting eucalyptus trees. The British company Biwater
carried out the feasibility study and co-wrote the Master Plan for the project. The project also received
support from the British government. 36 A second project started in 1990, the Land Distribution
Programme for the Poor Living in Degraded National Forest Reserves in North-east Thailand, known by
the Thai initials, Khor Jor Kor. Despite the project’s benign-sounding name the project was carried out by
the military’s Internal Security Operations Command and aimed to evict five million villagers from
National Reserve Forests and planting 1.37 million hectares of industrial tree plantations. 37
33 “Environmental Balancing Act”, Paper Watch, BILT Corporate Communications, Issue no. 52, 5 July 2004, page 4.
Paper Watch is the Indian company BILT’s corporate publication.
34 “Environmental Balancing Act”, Paper Watch, BILT Corporate Communications, Issue no. 52, 5 July 2004, page 4.
35 Leslie Crawford (1992) “Cheaper land, faster trees - Regional report: Latin America”, Financial Times, 14 December 1992.
36 Oliver Pye (2005) Khor Jor Kor Forest Politics in Thailand, White Lotus Press.
37 Ricardo Carrere and Larry Lohmann (1996) Pulping the South Industrial Tree Plantations and the World Paper Economy,
Zed Books, page 237.