Plantations, poverty and power - Critical Information Collective

71
3. Pulp Inc. Profiles of seven pulp industry proponents
There is a range of actors who actively promote the expansion of industrial tree plantations in the global
South. These include consulting firms, UN organisations, “aid” agencies, research institutions, industry
associations, industry publications and some NGOs. This network of actors, sometimes works together,
sometimes in competition, but all tending towards keeping the status quo: an increasingly large scale,
wood-based, globalised pulp industry.
The pulp and paper industry today looks the way it does to a large extent because it has relied on the
advice of northern-based consultants. Thirty years ago, Ken King, then-head of forestry at the FAO,
pointed out that developing countries very often could not afford to borrow the huge amounts of money
required to build a modern pulp mill. King described the “international clubs of consultants” who
travelled the world recommending precisely such large scale developments. This section starts with a
profile of the largest and most notorious of these forestry consulting firms: Pöyry.
Most industries form associations and alliances to promote their interests and in the case of the pulp and
paper industry these organisations can be extremely powerful. In Europe, the Confederation of European
Paper Industries (CEPI) constantly supports the interests of the European pulp and paper industry, issuing
press releases, lobbying at a European level, commissioning research and publishing industry-friendly
reports.
Aid agencies continue to play a crucial role in promoting the expansion of the pulp and paper industry
and its industrial tree plantations in the South. This role is illustrated by looking at the way the Asian
Development Bank, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and the European Investment
Bank support the industry.
The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation supports the pulp and paper industry in several
ways. Its definition of plantations as “planted forests” allows companies and governments to claim that
they are reforesting, when in fact, they are establishing vast areas of industrial tree monocultures. No one
would describe a sugar plantation as a “planted grassland”, yet this is precisely what the industry and its
supporters do when they describe industrial tree plantations as “planted forests”.
FAO recently produced a set of “voluntary guidelines on planted forests”. The guidelines may include
some useful statements, but they are voluntary, there is no enforcement mechanism and no penalty for
companies which choose to ignore the guidelines entirely. Ultimately the guidelines are a sham which
will do nothing to prevent the expansion of industrial tree plantations in the South. On the contrary, the
guidelines promote this expansion.
This section ends with a look at the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an organisation which is
effectively greenwashing the spread of industrial tree plantations in the South. FSC has certified millions
of hectares of monoculture tree plantations as “well managed”. By doing so, FSC is undermining local
struggles in the South. By remaining members of the FSC, NGO members of FSC also risk undermining
these struggles. By promoting paper products manufactured from FSC-certified plantations as
“environmentally friendly”, they are also guilty of misleading the public.