September 21st: International Day of Struggle against Monoculture Tree Plantations

Humankind faces an environmental, economic, and climate crisis that poses a threat to its survival through the continued promotion of monoculture tree plantations. Hence, Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) and the Consumers’ Association of Penang join other organizations worldwide in today’s International Day of Struggle Against Monoculture Tree Plantations.

This is a day for organizations, networks and movements to celebrate resistance and raise our voices to demand, “Stop the Expansion of Monoculture Tree Plantations!” which threaten the sovereignty of our peoples.

The negative impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, water sources, and the means of survival of local communities have been widely experienced worldwide, as in Malaysia. Destruction of these ecosystems endangers not only communities that directly depend on them, but also the planet as a whole.

Monoculture tree plantations replace indigenous plant species that supply the needs of both people and wildlife, and this means that natural ecosystems and biodiversity disappear.  Virgin or old-growth forests store carbon for centuries, whereas plantations and young forests are net emitters of carbon due to the disturbance of the soil and the degradation of the previous ecosystem.

Replacing natural vegetation with tree plantations leads to the depletion of ground and surface water. Monoculture tree plantations affect the health of the soil, increasing acidity and causing soil compaction. Forest plantations become further ecologically diminished with each successive harvest as carbon and water holding potential is reduced.

In Sarawak, after three decades of indiscriminate logging, the depletion in timber resources today has resulted in the advent of large monoculture plantations, of mostly pulp and paper and oil palm on formerly forested areas. We believe that at least 3 million hectares have been licensed out to such projects since the mid-1990s.

Compounding the matter is of course the fact that large tracts of such lands are also under indigenous customary land rights claims. If logging had destroyed their resources, plantations will wipe out entire forests. Many affected communities – from the more Southern divisions up to Bintulu and Miri – not only have to suffer the loss of traditional lands from which they derive income, food and other resources, but the people’s health is also at stake. As the communities greatly depend on rivers, some villages have had to resort to collecting rainwater for potable water. Many have reported skin rashes and other health problems after using rivers that have been polluted with agrochemicals.

There are many indirect or ‘downstream’ environmental impacts of tree plantations when they are clear-cut, transported and processed for export as logs, chips or pulp. Rivers, lakes and oceans are also polluted with mill effluent and chemicals.

In spite of all the accumulated evidence against monoculture tree plantations, corporate interests have continued to prevail. In addition, preserving nature has become a business. Today a range of radically new products such as carbon, biodiversity and water are being developed for sale through the Green Economy, rationalized by the claim that the only way to assure that nature is conserved is to price it.

The Green Economy means nothing more than new business opportunities for banks, investment funds, pension funds and transnational companies through the financialization of nature whereby they invest and speculate in large-scale monoculture tree plantations.

This is why, as part of the September 21st International Day of Struggle Against Monoculture Tree Plantations, and on the eve of the Eleventh Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which will be held in India on October 1-19, SAM has signed on an open letter, initiated by the World Rainforest Movement.

The open letter demands that our governments stop the expansion of tree plantations in our territories and take a firm stance at the Convention against the growing financialization of nature. This is a call to unite our struggles in order to demand that governments start a process of dismantling speculation in and commodification of life in a way that can help protect landscapes and livelihoods from the destruction and inequality exacerbated by the financialization of life.

“What indigenous peoples use to call ‘the sacred’ cannot be priced; it has to be defended.”

Press Conference, 21 September 2012