Paper forests.

• Author: Mattoon, Ashley T.
• Position: Negative effects of pulp plantations

Billions of trees are being planted to meet the world's soaring appetite for paper, but pulp plantations are hardly forests.

Open up International Paper's web page and the first thing you see, in large bold print, is: "We Plant an Average of 50 Million Trees Annually." International Paper bills itself as the world's largest private seedling grower: the company produces more than 300 million "genetically-improved" SuperTree[R] seedlings per year. Those aren't just trees they're planting - they're super trees. IP may be the biggest planter, but it is hardly unique in either word or deed. All over the world, large pulp and paper operations are cutting - and planting - trees at a record pace. And in an effort to convince the public that they are not only using forests responsibly, but improving them, the companies arc continually churning out feel-good slogans like: "for every tree harvested, two are planted," "there are 20 percent more trees in the United States today than there were in 1970," "managed forests will help prevent global warming by absorbing carbon," and so on.

The claims go even further than that. Even as the Earth's natural forest area continues to shrink by as much as 16 million hectares per year, the major pulp and paper companies present themselves as a sort of antidote to the trend. The industry, which posted 1995 sales in excess of $337 billion, argues that it's actually creating forests. And while it sometimes acknowledges that these artificial forests house very little biological diversity, it generally claims that the spread of intensively managed tree plantations is good news for the natural forests that remain. Plantations, the argument goes, are potentially so productive that they could largely satisfy, the demand for wood products, thereby relieving pressure on natural forests. Proponents of this view argue that the world's entire pulpwood demand could be met by a relatively small area of plantations. One recent study, based on 1993 data, concluded that plantations covering 40 million hectares could have met the world's total wood fiber demand for pulp in that year. That's an area less than 30 percent the amount of cropland usually planted in corn (about 140 million hectares).

Pulp and paper companies are not alone in their high expectations for industrial tree plantations. Many forestry consultants, governments, and even environmental groups see large-scale plantation forestry as the key to a sustainable wood supply for what is the most rapidly growing portion of the forest products sector: the production of woodchips and pulp to make paper, particle board, and other reconstituted wood products. Some argue that the global shift to tree farming is the forester's equivalent to the agricultural "Green Revolution" which favored high-yield crop varieties and large, mechanized farms at the expense of smaller, more diverse operations.

The planting of trees as crops is hardly a recent phenomenon. Brazil, which now boasts the world's largest planted area of eucalyptus (a group of popular plantation trees native to Australia), undertook its first extensive eucalyptus plantings around the turn of the century, as a fuel supply for the Sao Paulo railway. And given the pressures on the world's surviving natural forests, it's obvious that plantations must play a major role in the industrial wood supply. But there is growing evidence that the prevailing methods of plantation development are doing serious damage - both to natural forests and to the people who live in or around them.

To understand the problem, it's necessary first to grasp the rate and scale of current developments. In the past, the world's pulp mills got their pulpwood primarily from old-growth forests and second growth stands in the northern United States, Canada, and Scandinavia. Over the past 20 years, however, the wood fiber supply has begun to shift southward, to the southern United States and to a group of relatively new players, such as New Zealand, Indonesia, Chile, Brazil, and South Africa. In many southern countries, the prospect of a pulp and paper bonanza has resulted in lavish government subsidies and a rush of foreign investment. Of course, the underlying goal of the investments - both public and private - is not to save forests but to make money, by producing wood fiber as quickly and cheaply as possible. Ready money and an apparently insatiable market have led to enormous increases in plantation cover. In Latin America, for example, plantation area has increased 50 percent in just the last 12 years, to a current total of 7.5 million hectares - an area slightly larger than Panama. Many countries with large plantation estates plan to double their plantation area by the year 2010. Indonesia is planning to triple its plantation area within the next 15 years.

Despite the huge amounts of land involved, actually quantifying plantation extent is not an easy task. The global data on forest cover and land-use patterns are incomplete and often unreliable - the term "plantation" itself has no universally accepted definition. But a rough picture is available from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the only institution that regularly attempts to assess the extent of natural and plantation forest on a global scale. In its most recent survey, State of the World's Forests 1997, the FAO estimated that between 1980 and 1995, global plantation cover doubled in size, expanding from approximately 90 million hectares to 180 million hectares - just 10 million hectares less than the total land area of Mexico.

Certain limitations in the FAO survey, however, mean these numbers must be handled with care. The survey provides only very rough estimates of plantation cover in developed countries, for example, because of the difficulty of distinguishing natural forests from plantations in those regions. In developing countries, the survey doesn't include the extensive agricultural tree plantations, such as palm oil or rubber crops. Nor are industrial plantations distinguished from those that serve non-industrial purposes, such as community fuelwood supply, agroforestry, and environmental protection (through erosion control, watershed management, and so on). Also omitted is a key factor for understanding current trends: the distinction between plantations established in areas deforested long ago and those established in areas deforested as a prelude to plantation development.

But it is clear that as much as 100 million hectares of the global plantation estate is for industrial use. About three-quarters of that area is planted in relatively slow growing species - everything from the slower growing pines to teak. These stands are used primarily for producing timber in the ordinary sense of the term - the sawnwood and panels used in building construction and furniture making. (Their primary contribution to the pulp market is through scrap wood.) The remaining quarter of plantation area is planted in fast-growing species, mostly eucalyptus and the faster-growing pines. These are used mainly for pulpwood, and to a lesser extent for fiberboard and other reconstituted wood products.

From Timber to Fiber, From North to South

Even though the fast-growing plantations thus far comprise only a quarter of total industrial plantation cover, they are, for a couple of reasons, the trend-setting sector of the forest products industry. There is, first of all, the continuing growth in the paper and reconstituted wood products markets. While the production of sawnwood has roughly plateaued since the 1970s, wood pulp production has grown by...