The political economy of ‘flex trees’: a preliminary analysis

Abstract

With the rise of ‘bioeconomy’, trees are receiving increasing attention. This contribution conducts a preliminary analysis of the trajectories and the main drivers of change in the rise of new, flexible and multiple uses of trees. It assesses the political dimensions involved in this transformation, which is simultaneously ongoing, anticipated and imagined. Notes are offered on the issues to be considered when the flex-crop framework is operationalized to include the study of trees, and additional conceptualizations that help in analyzing the political economy of tree uses are provided. Areas needing further empirical study are identified and a preliminary research agenda is suggested. The flexible and multiple use of trees and tree-derived commodities is having a large impact on power relations in the global political economy of forestry and the forest industry, the asymmetry of which is based on who is best able to flex or de-multiply, thereby controlling commodity webs and processing technology. It is argued that while flexing seems to increase diversity, in practice it typically increases this only for the processing industry; the converse occurs in terms of the unification of the productive base into monocultures. However, these two processes go hand in hand, and illustrate how flexing is a deeply capitalist process.

Keywords:

• forest futures
• flex trees
• global forestry
• wood products
• ‘forest biorefineries’
• carbon sinks
• wood-based energy
• GM trees
• green economy
• flex tree plantations (FTPs)
• capitalism
• commoditization

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the people who have offered their valuable time for this research, including the anonymous reviewers and Jun Borras, Jenny Franco, Pietje Vervest, Alonso Fradejas, Gustavo Oliveira, Les Levidow, Sérgio Sauer, Ben White and all others participating in the flex crop-working group in the Hague. I am also grateful to those with whom I had the opportunity to reflect upon the future of the industry, including Jakob Donner-Amnell, Osmo Kuusi, Miia Tähtinen, Larry Lohmann and Winnie Overbeek. I would also like to thank Marie-Louise Karttunen for offering comments and revising the language in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Markus Kröger http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7324-4549

Notes

¹New flex products can be merely stop-gaps – as with the example of pine sap substituting for wheat flour in WWII Finland – or even the figments of imagination. ‘Flexing narratives’ have been used to support speculation and outright scams based on exaggerated technological promises (Borras et al. 2015), and it is essential to separate real advances from opportunistic advertising.

²In portfolio management, a beta of 1 signifies that an asset's value has corresponded with the market average, and −1 signifies that it has been inverse to the market: a beta of 0 signifies there is no historical correlation.

³By ‘narrative flexing’, I refer to a pathway that uses both Borras et al.’s (2015) ‘flex narratives’ (which do not depend on real, anticipated or imagined flexing, but can be used to legitimize a crop's use by claiming that, for example, palm oil is going to be used for food, not biodiesel, although the contrary is true) and their ‘imagined flexing’, ‘that is not real, not actually happening and has no material or logical basis, yet it is invoked for some reason’. I use the denotation here specifically for the case of ‘carbon capture’, which is a strong flex narrative, and can become real (in terms of capital accumulation) if ‘carbon credits’ are sold, but has no logical or material basis, as is discussed below.

⁴This historical argument is a topic that future research should explore in detail. A fruitful approach would be to merge the agenda of world-ecology and the flex-crop framework.

⁵Future research should delve deeper into studying these hypotheses, and fine-tuning the rough categorization between ‘North’ and ‘South’ as ideal types.

⁶Calculation based on author's analysis of METLA (2015) databases.

⁷The few pulp companies of the global South that already have both fast-wood pine and eucalyptus plantations and experience in pulping them and turning them into paper products, such as Klabin in Brazil's Paraná state, are already initiating massive new pulp investments with both softwood and hardwood lines, alongside lines for special paper products (Brembatti 2015).

⁸For example, in Canada and other countries where not much thinning is carried out during growth, more lumber than fiber-wood is produced compared with the Scandinavian model (personal communication with Jakob Donner-Amnell, April 2014, Helsinki), which relies on thinning 2–3 times per growth cycle, yielding almost solely fiber and energy-wood; timber is harvested only at the end (together with further fiber and energy-wood).

⁹Author's elaboration based on METLA (2015) databases.

¹⁰Other flex-crops do not have this geographical disparity as their possible reach is more limited than that of trees: corn, soybean, sugarcane or palms, for example, cannot be grown on an industrial scale in the circumpolar regions.

¹¹Leading companies’ GM engineers (interviews by the author, Portugal and Brazil, 2008–2013) have tried to develop a flex-eucalypt that would serve an assortment of interchangeable purposes (thus overcoming the lignin dilemma), but these attempts have not been successful. The current trajectory of GM trees is one of de-multiplying tree uses, to strive for agrotoxic-resistant and more adaptable varieties that use larger quantities of water and soil nutrients, faster than their conventional counterparts (hybrids, etc.), and may thus have higher yields (but at large costs to the environment – so these are only short-term gains). The possibility of flex-tree variety development is still very much just a theoretical one based on the preliminary literature review and other data assessed here, which did not reveal GM trees to be more than a narrative flexing. However, future research should verify these assumptions.

¹²This is a biological option as trees are not annual crops requiring re-planting but, socio-politically, the reality might often be that human action is required; TPs in the global South, for example, are enclosed by violent methods and under the surveillance of their controllers (see e.g. Carrere and Lohmann 1996; Kröger 2013b for this violence) while in Finland it is quite typical to find forest patches that were initially planted or semi-planted but left ‘on their own’ by the urbanized and conservation-minded family forest owner. These patches have become ‘default non-flexing material basis’, so long as the state/corporations do not force forest owners to stop their ‘non-action’ by demanding the forest be ‘put into use’ (in way they see fit) – an unlikely scenario under the new Finnish forest law which allows for greater leeway in forestry practices. These notes suggest the agency of both extra-human nature and those people in control of forest land in ‘default’ flexing.

¹³‘Biomass-based value web’ is a concept coined by Virchow et al. (2014), and is one basis for the flexing-approach – for Borras et al. (2015, 8): ‘“Value web” emphasizes a continuous strategic flexibility in supply chains and ultimate products – by contrast to ‘value chain’, which implies rigid linear relationships'.

¹⁴But it is hard to make any global prognosis, as the markets for car fuel are likely to be confusing for some years to come, with many alternatives (ethanol, methanol, biodiesel, biogas, electricity, hybrid, etc.) competing – only time will tell which of these will dominate (Jokinen, Mononen, and Sairinen 2011).

¹⁵Tall oil is sold to chemical-industry paint makers as resin, and companies relying on the supply are unhappy about now having to compete for an essential material for which they have no alternative source.

¹⁶Author's calculation based on METLA (2015) data.

¹⁷Pressured by the paper industry, the government curbed its incentive policy for heating wood, lowering the diameter of trees eligible for subsidies, so as to reserve small trees for pulp-making; such legislative moves can have major impacts on flexing pathways.

¹⁸According to Näyhä et al. (2014, 45), in 2013 there were 23 lignocellulosic, biomass-based biorefineries in operation or being built in Europe, but most of these were pilot or demonstration plants.

¹⁹Paradoxically, capitalistic competition that makes it difficult to share profits among biorefinery consortium members (to be viable, a large consortium of actors with differing skills is necessary to make flexing a reality) is a major obstacle to flexing expansion (see Näyhä and Pesonen 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This contribution was written while the author was working as an Academy of Finland-funded Researcher in Anthropology, Department of Social Research, and Political Science, Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki.

Notes on contributors

Markus Kröger

Markus Kröger is an adjunct professor in development studies at the University of Helsinki, Department of Political and Economic Studies, with a PhD in political science (world politics). He has published several articles and a book on the issues of capitalism and power relations, natural resource politics, land grabbing, rural social movements, the politics of forestry and mining development and agrarian changes in various regions of the world, including Latin America, the Arctic and India. His most recent book is Contentious agency and natural resource politics.