The political economy of global tree plantation expansion: a review

Abstract

This contribution analyses the recent global expansion of different types of tree plantations. A literature review collates accounts from recent academic publications and by NGOs, and is accompanied by field research and interview observations about the causal processes, central features and likely futures of contemporary tree plantation expansion. I will analyse the political and spatial causalities explaining varieties and commonalities in expansion style and pace, with elaboration on the applied and empirical significance of these findings for peasant studies. The literature on environmental and developmental impacts of tree plantation expansion is also surveyed.

Keywords:

• industrial tree plantations
• forest industry
• capitalism
• power
• land grabbing
• smallholders
• space
• flex trees

I would like to thank Jun Borras and three anonymous reviewers for their excellent remarks, and Winnie Overbeek, Jan-Erik Nylund and Larry Lohmann for very constructive comments on some parts of the paper. The research was funded by the Academy of Finland.

Notes

¹‘Bio’ and ‘green’ are placed in quotation marks here, as many argue that fast-growing TPs and other new investments labelled as green and bio are not really sustainable. For example, the use of petrochemicals in many biofuel plantations renders them as not green and bio enough to deserve the label that has a connotation of sustainability (see Böttcher and Lindner 2010).

²Food and oil markets and companies define palm oil prices and production, not timber markets or forest companies. Forest, oil and food industries have different logics, and the planting of oil palm differs significantly in terms of labour and capital relations from the forest industry. See McCarthy (2010) for a study on the commodity-specific characters of oil palm, including the ways in which oil palm plantations ‘have agency’ and influence human practices. From the viewpoint of peasant studies, one key difference is that oil palm requires much more labour-force than TPs, which can be much more mechanized.

³In contrast to tree plantations in general, rubber plantations have not expanded much, their area being about 8 million hectares in 1990 and 10 million hectares in 2010 according to FAO (2010). The study of rubber is useful in illustrating the emergence of the flex tree complex: from metal and chemical industry use, old rubber plantations turn to (wood) energy use. However, the relative insignificance of rubber plantations in the global picture, and non-usability as timber in the forest industry, suggested an only cursory exploration of them in this review.

⁴There are over 600 known eucalyptus species, of which about 20 are currently widely used commercially. Hybrids such as E. globulus and E. urograndis are common, the first providing the best quality fiber for pulp and papermaking and used for example in Portugal, and the latter being the fastest growing, used particularly in Brazil. Breeders constantly develop new clones of eucalyptus and pine species. All the pine and eucalyptus species will be referred to as simply pine and eucalyptus.

⁵There is a wide variety of corporations and smallholders. Smallholders are defined here (based on induction from empirical evidence in TP cases) as those family farmers who have direct and preferential access to land and are partially self-sufficient, partially engaged with markets. Smallholders here differ from peasants (as distinguished by Watts 2009a, 524) in that they are not necessarily self-sufficient at all (all of their land may be planted with trees sold for money that buys food), may not be subordinate actors in larger political economies such as national timber markets, and may be autonomous and not fulfilling obligations to holders of political and economic power. A smallholder has control over the rights and power in the deployment of labour and means of production in a space which spans a few hectares territorially.

⁶Pokorny et al. (2010) consider that traditional communities' TPs are also a form of smallholder plantation, alongside individual farmers' TPs. In this contribution, STPs signify home and family farming and other small-scale (up to 20 ha, varying across contexts) individually-controlled TPs. In contrast to the four types of TPs presented in this paper, CIFOR's (Center for International Forestry Research) five-fold typology (CIFOR 2001, Kanninen 2010, 3) looks at the industrial-non-industrial use separation (quite common in forestry science), the production purpose and style, rather than power relations. The typology here, on the other hand, distinguishes social actors that control TPs (corporate, smallholder, public and community).

⁷For a theoretical study on when, where and why resistance and TP conflict surges, see Kröger (2013b); for a global review of TP conflicts, see Gerber (2010).

⁸When differences of capital are misperceived as differences of honor, they function as what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1991, 238).

⁹The World Rainforest Movement (WRM, the most well-known and consistent NGO criticizing ITPs, with a large production of publications, research and data on the topic) and various other NGOs as well as hundreds of scientists and citizens have been campaigning for more than a decade to try to change the FAO definition of forests, arguing the agency is captured by the wood-based industry (see WRM 2011a, 2011b).

¹⁰The concept of ‘planted forest’ was introduced in the early 2000s. It is a much broader concept than the older ‘forest plantation’, roughly doubling the size of plantations in FAO statistics (Kanninen 2010). FAO (2004) conceptualizes ‘forest plantations’ as having ‘few species, even spacing and/or even-aged stands’. In contrast, ‘planted forests’ can have many species of different age in stands, and uneven spacing, and are defined as ‘predominantly composed of trees established through planting and/or after deliberate seeding of native or introduced species’ (Carle and Holmgren 2008). The latter category of ‘planted forests’ includes thus natural forest-looking tree stands, semi-natural forests that non-foresters typically do not consider ‘plantations’. In studying TPs per se, ‘forest plantation’ data would be more precise. However, the FAO data does not offer data on ‘forest plantations’ anymore.

¹¹However, FAO (2010) presents Mexico as having had no tree plantations at all in 1990; in FAO (2011) the figure for 1990 Mexico is 350,000 ha. When I asked about the discrepancy, an FAO official responded by email that 350,000 ha seems like a mistake, but could not give definite answer on why there is a mistake, or if this is a mistake. If the figure is zero, then the TP growth in Mexico has been even higher than 815 percent.

¹²FAO 2011 counts North Africa twice: it considers this region to belong to both Africa and Near East. For this reason the global total of FAO data does not match with the sub-parts. I have corrected this error in Table 1 by removing North Africa from Near East data, making the global sum match with regional figures.

¹³Whereas the corporate TP expansion is relying almost solely on exotic tree-species monocultures (Del Lungo et al. 2006, FAO 2010) – the 6.14 million ha ITP increase figure (1990–2005) being thus an expression of true ITP expansion – a large part of the smallholder, community and public ‘planted forests’ are not exotic-species monocultures managed intensively.

¹⁴The more embedded a contentious actor is in political games in relation to industry embedding, the more likely it will achieve its goals – other strategies supporting it (Kröger 2013a).

¹⁵For example, India, with 70 percent public ownership, had only 13 percent of exotic plantations (FAO 2010), but in Chile, with 70 percent corporate ownership (Del Lungo et al. 2006), 100 percent of plantations were exotic (FAO 2010). See Nylund and Kröger (2012) for further analysis on the cleavage in the understanding of sustainability between the industry and the local communities.

¹⁶Most of this prognosis is overtly unrealistic, used as marketing discourses by companies seeking to attract speculative investors to finance them; see e.g. the discourses by genetically modified (GM)-eucalyptus developers in Vidal (2012).

¹⁷The prices for NBSK, Northern bleached softwood kraft pulp (the industry's benchmark grade of pulp), in the U.S. were over USD 1,000 per ton in February 2014 (FOEX Indexes Ltd 2014). This is a very high figure; consequently, streamlined mills have margins of about 40 percent (Kröger 2012a). Insofar as commodity prices rise, as they have done, those who got in early in land markets will be happy with their established corporate enclaves.

¹⁸Examples include nanocellulose fibres to create material with different penetration, reflection and other speciality qualities, which can be of use in many industries. Cellulose nanofibres are potentially much stronger than synthetic fibres, and have much smaller diameters, allowing for specialty use. This way, much stronger papers could be produced, and also medical industry and electronic applications could use these products, argue the proponents of the technology (Coughlin n.d.)

¹⁹Although most GM tests on non-flowering trees in the world are done in Finland, Brazil is about to legalize GM eucalyptus, having already given permits for trials, for example, and all around the world there are test sites (Kuusi 2010). China is the only place that has given permission to plant GM trees on any scale, having 1 million GM pines (Vidal 2012).

Additional information

Markus Kröger is an Academy of Finland post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Department of Political and Economic Studies, with a PhD in Political Science. He has published several articles and a book on the issues of natural resource politics, land grabbing, social movement outcomes, the politics of forestry development and rural changes in Latin America. His most recent book is Contentious agency and natural resource politics. Email: [email protected]