Plantations, poverty and power - Critical Information Collective

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1. Plantations do not plant themselves. Nor do pulp mills build themselves
In May 2005, at a meeting in Vancouver, Mario Higino Leonel, the Executive Director of BRACELPA
(the Brazilian Pulp and Paper Association) gave a presentation titled “Forest Plantations in Brazil”. He
told his audience that plantations are a “Vector for Sustainable Development”. He illustrated the point
with a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles, labelled “Environmental”, “Social” and “Economic”. In
the small overlapping area in the centre are the letters “SFM”: sustainable forest management. 2
Leonel talked about the importance of a Code of Best Practices for Planted Forests. He talked about how
the area of plantations has increased in Brazil. The vast majority of Brazil’s plantations were established
between 1965 and 1987, during which period the area increased from 500,000 hectares to 6 million
hectares. He explained how the growth rates of plantations (about 60 per cent of which are eucalyptus
plantations) increased from about 15 cubic metres per hectare in 1970 to over 60 cubic metres per hectare
by 2000. He explained that plantations contributed US$17.5 billion worth of trade in 2004 and that they
provided 1.5 million direct jobs. And he explained how plantations restore degraded land, conserve the
soil, use land not fit for traditional agriculture, protect biodiversity and watersheds, sequester CO 2 and
relieve pressure on what he described as “natural forests”.
The most interesting aspect of Leonel’s presentation is what he decided not to talk about. Leonel did not
point out the difference between forests and industrial tree plantations. Forests are diverse ecosystems
which provide a range of goods for people and animals. Industrial tree plantations are monocultures
which provide one product: fibre for the pulp and paper industry or charcoal for the steel industry, for
example.
The failure to differentiate forests from plantations is the starting point of industry propaganda for
industrial tree plantations. By describing their monocultures as reforestation, the industry can fool
ignorant audiences in the North that it is doing something good. But the only similarity between a forest
and a plantation is that both contain trees.
Leonel did not mention that industrial tree plantations in Brazil are increasingly the target of protests by
the land rights movement, farmers and Indigenous Peoples. While the figures describing the contribution
of industrial tree plantations to the Brazilian economy look impressive, these figures do not reveal what
has been lost: the livelihoods of thousands of people who lived on the land before it was converted to
industrial tree plantations. Invisible in Leonel’s presentation are the thousands of people who were left
with no option other than to move to the favelas surrounding Brazil’s major cities.
Leonel gives figures for the number of people employed in plantations, but he does not describe how
dangerous and poorly paid that work is. In fact, plantation operations are heavily mechanised and
therefore employ few people. In recent years, many of the jobs on plantations have been contracted out
meaning that workers often lose the few benefits they had. A 2001 report for the UN International Labour
Organisation notes that in Chile almost all timber harvesting is carried out by contractors. A 1998 survey
of forest workers in Chile found that when their jobs were contracted out two-thirds of workers saw a
2 Mario Higino Leonel (2005) “Forest Plantations in Brazil”, Advisory Committee on Paper and Wood Products - FAO,
Vancouver, 31 May 2005. http://www.fao.org/forestry/media/10549/1/0/