***********************************************
WORLDWIDE
FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS
Pulp,
Paper and Power
***********************************************
Forest
Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises
September
23, 1995
OVERVIEW
& SOURCE
The
following _Ecologist_ article posted in econet's forest.paper
conference
is a wonderful expose on the industrial pulp and paper
industry. The dispossession, pollution and
deforestation caused
by this
industry is highlighted; as is the extent to which the
pulp
and paper industry has concentrated power and economic might
in
order to continue these practices. 1993
paper consumption
figures
for many countries are included to illustrate inequities
in
paper resource use.
*******************************
RELAYED
TEXT STARTS HERE:
/*
Written 12:24 PM Sep 24, 1995 by
gn:llohmann in
igc:forest.paper
*/
/*
---------- "Pulp, Paper and Power" ---------- */
Pulp,
Paper and Power:
How an
Industry Reshapes its Social Environment
by
Anita
Kerski
In: The
Ecologist, July/August 1995
SUMMARY:
The dispossession, deforestation and pollution caused by
the
pulp and paper industry is tied to a dynamic of
ever-increasing
scale, concentration and capital intensiveness
which
has characterized the industry since the Industrial
Revolution.
Crucial to this dynamic are attempts by the industry
and its
allies to refashion the political and physical
infrastructure
through which they work, capturing subsidies,
managing
demand, centralizing power, and evading, digesting and
regulating
resistance. In such a context, the claim that the
industry
helps society meet its pre-existing needs "more
efficiently"
makes little sense.
In
recent years, the expansion of the pulp and paper industry has
provoked
increasing opposition throughout the world. In Europe,
South-East
Asia, and South and North America, campaigns are
gaining
momentum to reduce dioxins and other toxic compounds
produced
by the use of chlorine in the paper-making process. In
Canada,
932 people arrested for protesting against logging for
pulpwood
near Vancouver Island's Clayoquot Sound went before the
courts
in the summer of 1993 in the largest mass trial in Canadian
history.1
In Indonesia, environmentalists and local people are
alarmed
at the planned pulping of over 6,000 square kilometres of
native
hardwood stands on Sumatra and Kalimantan by the turn of
the
century,2 while the expansion of monoculture pulpwood
plantations
is rousing opposition from Chile, Brazil and the
Dominican
Republic to Portugal, Finland, India and Australia.
The
response of apologists for the pulp and paper industry to this
outcry
relies partly on several assumptions about the industrial
economy,
namely that:
* Companies do not alter society's goals
and needs but leave
them
untouched; they merely provide wealth, goods and jobs which
help
society do better what it is doing already.
* It is the drive to do so efficiently
and competitively
which
causes such firms to increase the size of paper machines and
to seek
cheaper production sites around the world.
* Any social and environmental disruption
which results from
this
expansion requires at most some adjustments to the market
apparatus
or state regulatory systems, not a rethink of the
industry's
scale, structure or political relationships with the
rest of
society.
Such
assumptions have long been under attack by affected people
and
critical social scientists. These critics point out that, far
from
passively responding to consumer demand, public consensus and
government
regulation, modern corporations have a deep interest in
forming
and managing them, and that, rather than creating wealth
for
all, such firms typically survive only through hidden handouts
from
public coffers.3 In these circumstances, the pulp and paper
industry's
defence that, through seeking profits, it is merely
increasing
society's "efficiency" in meeting the pre-existing
needs
of its members becomes highly questionable.4
The industry's
current drive towards larger scale and global
expansion
cannot be explained solely by "economics". But neither
is it
being driven by a political conspiracy of unseen masterminds
in
transnational corporation boardrooms acting with the careless
ease of
omnipotence. Social structures sensitive to the needs of
pulp
and paper elites are built, expanded and improved upon only
through
the political efforts of a multitude of agents with
different
interests and motivations, working together in an ad hoc
and
sometimes uncoordinated fashion against an ever-varying
background
of resistance. Close attention to this dynamic is
likely
to be crucial to the success of environmentalists' efforts
to
reduce the damage done by the industry.
Machine
Politics
The
evolution of pulp and paper technology has always been
intertwined
not merely with profit but with the attempt of small
elites
to rearrange structures of power in their favour. For
example,
although a boom in publishing in the seventeenth and
eighteenth
centuries had contributed to an increased demand for
paper
which the prevailing artisanal, rag-based technology could
not
easily meet, Nicholas-Louis Robert's invention of the
forerunner
of the modern paper-making machine near Paris in the
late
1790s was, by his own account, neither a profit-seeking
response
to demand for more paper nor an attempt to replace scarce
rags
with other raw material. Rather, it was an attempt to
undercut
the power restive paper artisans held at a time of
revolution
by centralizing paper-making technique in the hands of
factory
owners.5 It was not until the late nineteenth-century
development
of commercial techniques for pulping wood, a material
which
could be harvested at any time and easily stored and shipped
in
great volume, that the full potential of the new machine began
to be
realized.
The
switch to wood as a raw material reinforced papermakers'
reliance
on large, highly-mechanized mills -- for one thing, the
chipping
equipment and stone grinders used to process logs
produced
too much pulp for small paper mills to absorb.6 Yet the
more
that the pulp and paper industry invested in huge,
wood-adapted
pulp and paper machines, integrated with the timber
industry
and decoupled from any other source of raw materials, the
less
inclined the trade became to consider any other approach.
Early
twentieth-century paper machines tended to be both
standardized
and profitable. But competition among newspaper
magnates
in North America and Britain to build ever-bigger paper
machines
soon escalated. The huge machines became less and less
cost-effective:
not only were many of them "one-offs", but their
huge
widths and speeds -- by 1937, machines could produce a
kilometre-long
sheet of paper 7.7 metres wide in little more than
two
minutes -- also required sophisticated and expensive controls
for
efficient operation. As British paper expert A. W. Western
remarks:
"no
logical reasons can be traced for increasing size to this
extent.
Labour costs have often been quoted, but machine labour
was
then, and still is, a relatively small proportion of overall
costs.
More likely reasons . . . were pride and prestige."7
Between
1930 and 1975, as the technological race continued, the
cost
per annual tonne of a newsprint machine increased at least
40-fold
while the price of newsprint itself increased less than
20-fold.
Yet the major machine manufacturers' investment in large
machine
tools had by now made it difficult for them to produce for
anyone
but the largest paper investors. As Western concludes,
building
new paper machines:
"became
a luxury which could be afforded only by multinational
giants
or the governments of developing countries, advised by
consultants
that only scale to this degree could be economic! For
the
consultants, it was economic: they were now essential for
large
mill design and coordination."8
Nicholas-Louis
Robert's nearly 200-year-old dream of concentrating
paper-making
power in the hands of plant owners, in short, had
been realized
with a vengeance. Access to the dominant stream of
papermaking
knowledge was now restricted not just to capital, but
to big
capital. For many capital-short Southern societies with
interests
in meeting their own paper needs efficiently with
indigenous
materials and technology, the implications were
particularly
bleak.
Reorganizing
Landscapes
Today,
90 per cent of paper pulp is made of wood, either by
grinding
it up or chipping and boiling it in strong chemicals.
Large
quantities of fresh water and energy are required for the
process,
which consumes annually the rough equivalent of the
timber
that would cover 20,000 square kilometres of wooded land,
an area
half the size of Switzerland. Paper manufacture is
estimated
to account for nearly 13 per cent of total wood use, and
represents
one per cent of the world's total economic output.9
Most of
the pulped wood which is used to manufacture newsprint,
packaging
board and writing paper flows from a small number of
sprawling
plants, shining with expensive, computer-assisted
machinery
and costing up to US$1 billion apiece. In the United
States,
whose world-leading output of 58 million tonnes of pulp
per
year is supplied by a mere 203 mills, the pulp and paper
industry
is more capital-intensive than any other.10 New mills in
Indonesia,
Brazil and Canada are no less capital-intensive, some
of them
requiring capital investments of US$750,000 or more for
each
employee.11
The
giant pulping machines at such plants have to be run nearly 24
hours a
day if the massive debts incurred in their construction
are to
be paid off on schedule. This reinforces the mills' need
for
secure access to huge supplies of nearby water and wood. Hence
the
mills must not only be sited on large rivers, but must also
have
access to large, more or less contiguous timberlands. Much
pulp
and paper manufacture in both North and South is thus closely
integrated
with the timber industry, is sited in countries which
are
strongholds of industrial forestry practice such as Germany,
Sweden
and Canada, and tends both to promote and be promoted by
government
bureaucracies which grant large logging concessions to
big
corporations.
Pulp
mills find it difficult to share the landscapes they occupy
with
local communities pursuing a variety of agricultural, fishing
and
subsistence-gathering activities. Large mills work better with
simplified,
compact populations of factory-friendly trees, for
example,
than with native woodlands reserved for a variety of
uses.
They demand the construction of roads or waterways which run
straight
from cutting site to port or factory instead of a web of
slow
systems of transport linking one local area to another. They
favour
the growth of mill towns where everyone works for the
industry
rather than communities with diverse livelihoods. The
ideology
of an industry dominated by large mills, finally, tends
to be
one which privileges a supposedly "global" demand for pulp
over
varied local demands for individual farm plots, diverse
native
woodlands, clean water and air, and the maintenance of
fine-grained
craft practices which make possible local control
over
native forests and wetlands.
The
pulp and paper industry often justifies its preference for
large-scale,
single-centred systems over many-centred social
mosaics
by claiming that they help release latent economic
"efficiencies".
From the point of view of a farmer in, say,
South-East
Asia, however, the engineering of such centralized
systems
may well be a fighting matter, entailing uncompensated
losses
of water, soil, fodder, fish, transport, or livelihood
generally.12
For such a farmer, as for the paper artisan made
redundant
by Robert's paper machine, retrospective talk of
"efficiencies"
would likely be viewed as anachronistic, a way of
writing
out of history what are more accurately described as
bitter,
prolonged political and cultural struggles between
radically
different social systems.
Influencing
Demand
Just as
the pulp and paper industry, as organized today, cannot
easily
fit its production into a social mosaic of
locally-organized
landscapes, so too it cannot easily accommodate
itself
to "market demand". What with the easy availability of debt
finance,
the lack of need to buy into brand names, the sheer scale
of each
new state-of-the-art mill, and the temptation of many
firms
to become price-setters, any surge in demand during the last
few
decades has invariably resulted in more investment in
productive
capacity than is actually required to meet it.13
One
consequence is a savage boom-and-bust cycle. In 1993, for
example,
after the most recent bout of overinvestment, pulp prices
dropped
to half of what they had been four years previously,14
leading
to rampant losses, cost-cutting, closures, mergers and
takeovers.
Although prices have now climbed once again to record
levels,
many industry figures fear that a new round of
overspending
is on the way. With the enormous equipment costs and
long
lead times required to bring huge new mills and pulpwood
plantations
on stream -- over two years and 10-15 years
respectively
-- it is not surprising that the industry feels
growing
pressure not only to invest more wisely, cooperate on
pricing15
and develop better relationships with buyers, but also
to plan
demand in a way which might moderate future price dips. As
David
Clark of the European Confederation of Paper Industries
recently
told his colleagues, the industry must:
"fight
for our future and create our own growth . . . total demand
has to
be stimulated. The alternative, to do nothing, could
produce
a static or even declining demand with serious
implications
for the industry, its reputation, its technology and
the
quality of the people it attracts."16
In this
way, large scale becomes a cause as well as an effect of
efforts
to reorganize society in ways friendly to a few central
actors.
Stimulation
of paper demand is, however, nothing new, and is not
something
the industry has to undertake alone (see Box,
pp.146-147).
Ever since wood-based pulps inaugurated an age of
cheap,
large-scale paper production in the mid-1800s, new
commodities
-- ranging from paper shirt collars, building
materials,
bags, toilet paper, drinks cartons, nappies, fax and
computer
paper, and export packaging -- have been embedding paper
use
ever more thoroughly into business and household activities.17
In
1991, over 40 per cent of world paper production was used for
packaging
and wrapping, while only 30 per cent went for printing
and
writing and 13 per cent for newsprint, with increasing volumes
of all
three categories going for advertising.18
Tying
demand for paper to a broad range of economic activities
outside
publishing has helped free world per capita paper
consumption
to expand indefinitely. Rising from .01 kilogrammes
yearly
in 1910 to 15 kilogrammes in 1950 and around 46 kilogrammes
in
1993,19 it shows no signs, unlike per capita sawnwood
consumption,
of levelling off. "Efficiency" can no longer be
plausibly
described as, say, "efficiency in producing the medium
for the
books which society needs", but is increasingly merely an
ability
to produce as much paper as possible as cheaply as
possible.
Unsurprisingly,
per capita paper consumption is not a good index
of
literacy, being perhaps a better indicator of what conventional
development
economists consider "economic success" (see Table). In
1993,
the South plus Eastern Europe, with 84 per cent of the
world's
people, consumed less than a quarter of its paper and
board,
while the North plus the fast-growing Asian "tigers", with
just
over 16 percent of the world's people, accounted for over
three-quarters.
US citizens, while they consume 43 times as much
oil as
Indians, consume a full 386 times as much pulpwood.20
TABLE:
How
"global" is "global consumption"?
Paper
consumption, selected countries, 1993
Country Kgs per capita
USA 313
Japan 225
Hong
Kong 220
Finland 215
Taiwan 205
Germany 190
UK 170
Australia 152
Italy 132
South
Korea 128
Ireland 97
Malaysia 62
Chile 39
Poland 31
Thailand 30
Russia 30
Brazil 28
Bulgaria 20
China 17
Egypt 11
Indonesia 10
Serbia 10
Nicaragua 4
Nigeria 3
India 3
Viet
Nam 1
Ghana <1
Laos <1
Source:
Pulp and Paper International, July 1994
Surfing
on Resistance
Opposition
to the pulp and paper industry's plans and operations
-- like
demand, infrastructure, labour unrest and state regulation
--
constitute an important part of the industry's evolutionary
environment,
one which it is constantly seeking to modify.
Certain
types of resistance are fairly easy for large actors in
the
industry to eliminate or circumvent, simply by redistributing
their
ample resources from one place to another. By themselves,
such
types of resistance often even wind up favouring conditions
which
lead to increased concentration or centralization of the
industry
and its support networks -- a development which, in the
end,
may be far from environmentally benign.
In
Europe, to take one example, agitation and legislation against
the
industry's air and water pollution is being treated by a few
far-sighted
companies not as a political threat but as an economic
opportunity.
Hoping to transform anti-chlorine sentiment into a
huge
demand for totally chlorine-free pulp, for instance, the
Swedish
firm Sodra Cell, has invested in cleaner technology of a
type
affordable only by the biggest corporations. If companies
such as
Sodra succeed, they are likely only to strengthen their
centralizing
hold on land, forest and other resources.
By the
same token, honouring the call for more paper recycling is
not an
unmanageable strain for an industry accustomed for over a
century
to using waste paper as a raw material and now being given
increasing
economic incentives to do so. Due largely to
environmental
pressures, the ratio of waste paper to other raw
materials
rose from 18 per cent in 1970 to 32 per cent in 1988,
and
continues to climb (though it has always been high in many
Southern
countries).21 Yet because recycling is now conducted
within
a regional or global economic system integrated largely
around
the interests of a few central actors, it often involves
such
environmentally dubious practices as transporting huge
amounts
of waste paper between the US and China.22 The dumping of
large
amounts of waste on the international market, as happened as
a
result of recent environmental legislation in Germany, can also
easily
disrupt small local paper-collection attempts.
Environmentalist
resistance to the pulp and paper industry's
exploitation
of forests in one country, similarly, by itself tends
merely
to encourage companies with sufficient resources to try to
organize
fibre production on a hemispheric or global scale. The
most
striking instance of this tendency is the expanding
wood-fibre
network centred on Japan.
The
growth in Japanese annual paper consumption from 47 to 121
kilogrammes
per capita between 1960 and 1970 was largely dependent
on
developing sources of raw material in the US Pacific Northwest
as
alternatives to expensive local fibre. But as these sources
started,
in turn, to become less economically, politically and
biologically
accessible in the 1980s (due to sawmill slowdowns,
domestic
competition for wood residues, forest depletion, and,
finally,
environmental resistance and legislation), Japanese
industry
consortia began to build up joint fibre ventures in
Canada,
Oceania, South-East Asia and Latin America -- many of them
lavishly
subsidized by "foreign aid". By 1989, when a second surge
in
domestic consumption had brought yearly per capita consumption
of pulp
and paper to 222 kilogrammes, Japan was importing wood
chips
or pulp from sources as far-flung as Brazil, South Africa,
Fiji,
Finland, Thailand and the South-Eastern US. Faced by rural
protests
in Thailand, and fearing rising environmentalism in
Australia
and Chile, Japanese companies were also laying plans to
secure
supplies from the interior of northern Canada, Viet Nam,
Siberia,
Argentina, Venezuela and West Papua. Today, the average
wood
fibre embedded in a sheet of Japanese paper or cardboard has
travelled
more than 6,000 kilometres from its point of origin.23
As
native forests are exhausted and local resistance provoked,
pulp
and paper industries are turning increasingly to industrial
tree
plantations to furnish large amounts of fresh, uniform raw
material
on a smaller land base, avoiding conflict with other land
uses.
Although industrial plantations currently supply
considerably
less than a quarter of world demand for pulpwood,
this
proportion is bound to rise, given deforestation, the
limitations
of recycling (fibres can only be reused a few times
before
disintegrating into dust), and the resistance of much of
the
industry to non-wood materials.24
This
shift to plantation pulpwood provides more incentives for the
industry
to move raw fibre production to new regions, especially
to the
South. In countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, trees
such as
eucalyptus or acacia grow faster, land is cheaper, and
companies
are able to benefit from lower-cost labour and severer
political
repression than in the North.25 All this entails low
prices
for wood, which, as Robert A. Wilson of the Anglo-French
conglomerate
Arjo Wiggins Appleton remarks, is "the strategic
driver
in the industry . . . the key competitive
differentiator."26
Pulp
mills are often integrated with the new Southern
plantations.
This is not only because it makes more economic sense
to
combine wood and pulp production than to keep them separate,
and to
export fibre in the more concentrated form of pulp than in
the
watery form of wood chips, but also because environmental
regulations
are looser in the South than in the North, foreign aid
subsidies
easier to obtain, and consumption, especially in the
Asia-Pacific
region, likely to grow faster. Thus Brazil, Chile,
Portugal,
New Zealand and South Africa, none of whom have been
traditionally
strong in the pulp and paper industry, are now among
the top
nine exporters of pulp, their principal customers being in
industrialized
countries. Indonesia, meanwhile, whose production
of pulp
grew at an average rate of 29 per cent yearly between 1980
and
1991, is already one of the top seven world paper shippers.27
Resistance
provoked by this shift to the South, of course,
presents
the industry with still more problems. Providing it is
scattered,
however, it can often be handled fairly easily. Pulp or
pulpwood
businesses in South-East Asia, for example, have blunted
community
resistance by approaching individuals with money, land,
goods
or jobs, or by setting up gambling schemes to relieve
plantation
opponents of their money. More intransigent opponents
have
been subjected to beatings, murder threats, accusations of
treason
or Communism, or harassment of their families by
government
employees or even religious leaders. If resistance to
seizures
of land for plantations is stubborn yet isolated,
small-scale,
poorly-coordinated, and out of the domestic or
international
public eye, military suppression may result; if
protests
are more widespread and well-coordinated, contract
farming
schemes may be rolled out instead as a way of gaining
local
people's active collaboration in raw material production.28
Freedom
to Plant
Other
sorts of resistance are more difficult to deal with. No
paper
corporation, faced with coordinated, publicly-visible
opposition
to the development of large-scale, new industrial
pulpwood
plantations across large areas of the globe, can buy it
off
everywhere it arises, smash it completely, or shift its search
for raw
materials to another planet. Nor can the industry, as
presently
constituted, countenance an open and persistent
discussion
of reducing or even stabilizing demand for pulp and
paper
in industrialized countries. Skewed world paper consumption
must remain,
for paper executives, evidence not that high
consumers
are consuming too much but that low consumers are
consuming
too little.
Just as
today's pulp and paper industry cannot acquiesce in
existing
demand or existing social mosaics, so, too, it cannot
simply
"surf" on these more threatening types of opposition,
translate
them into "economic signals", or evade them by shifting
operations
elsewhere. Rather, its network must actively colonize
the
society of such resisters just as its network infiltrates
societies
of consumers or of subsistence farmers.
Here a
subtler strategy comes into play: that of divide and
conquer.
The idea is to discredit or suppress critics; cultivate
critics'
potential, but as yet uncommitted, allies; and block
communication
and alliances between the two groups -- for
instance,
between critics of plantations in the South and their
potential
allies among environmental organizations in the North.
Thus
Arjo Wiggins Appleton pulpwood plantation executives O
Fernandez
Carro and Robert A Wilson urge their colleagues not to
target
"apparent opposition" if that means "forgetting the vast
mass in
between: the public". Politics, they continue:
"provides
the packaging and the vehicle to achieve the industrial
objectives.
Success is measured by the freedom to plant fibre
crops,
recognizing the sum total of all the political forces (in
the
broadest sense). There are two elements to the political
subsystem:
the message and the target. The message needs to be
short,
nontechnical, and fundamental: for example, 'Trees are
good.
We need more trees not less'. Our objective should be to
create
and move inside an ever-increasing friendly circle of
public
opinion".29
In
creating such a "friendly circle of public opinion", the
industry
often benefits from a global reach longer than that of
its
critics in the South. Industry spokespeople, for example,
frequently
attempt to seek support from urban or Northern
audiences,
including environmentalists, by affirming that pulp
production
has nothing to do with logging natural forests in the
South,
insisting disingenuously that new trees which have been
planted
on "degraded" and "unused" land are used instead. Isolated
from
grassroots groups in the South and from internal industry
discussions,
most Northern environmentalists have been unable to
reply
with the facts, namely that:
* most of the giant new
Scandinavian-planned export pulp
mills
in Sumatra are being fed in their initial stages by mixed
tropical
hardwoods;30
* in Chile, Brazil and Indonesia, the way
has often been
cleared
for monoculture pulpwood plantations by logging native
forests;31
* in Thailand and elsewhere, the
establishment of
plantations
on farmland, pasture or commons has often driven the
inhabitants
to clear natural forests elsewhere;32
* the industry is little interested in
investing in
"degraded
land" but rather, in the words of Shell International,
in
"land suitable for superior biological growth rates for those
species
the market wants" as well as "year-round water" and easy
access
to nearby processors or ports.33
Engineered
Consent and Astroturf Groups
To help
colonize democratic discussion and replace it with a more
predictable
type of interchange, pulp and paper companies and
industry
associations have also set up public relations (PR)
operations
in all major national markets. The object is not merely
to
"engineer consent" -- using such means as advertising,
lobbying,
purchasing expert testimony, distributing press
releases,
commissioning books, manipulating journalists, launching
opinion
polls and creating "community advisory panels"34-- but
also to
monitor industry critics, with an eye to weakening their
links
to other sectors of the public.
In
1993, for example, Finnish consulting firm Jaakko Poyry began
publishing
a confidential quarterly intelligence report on
environmentalist
thinking and activities, aimed at a clientele of
wealthy
companies. Industry-retained PR firms also maintain files
on
activist groups, their leaderships, methods of operations,
anticipated
reactions to new products, funding sources and
"potential
for industry relationship", with a view to finding out
"what's
motivating them, how serious they are, what they will
consider
'success'".35 Such firms advise pulp and paper
corporations
and their allies on how to offer financial support to
environmentalist
groups which need funding and "respectability",
as well
as how to go about putting critical individual
environmentalists
or former regulators on their payrolls.
PR
companies may also infiltrate environmental meetings in the
guise
of activists or "housewives" to gather information or
"guide"
discussions; pose as journalists in order to obtain
previews
of research results which might be damaging to industry;
or
sabotage promotional tours of books critical of industry. One
such
firm, the US's Burson-Marsteller -- which, with annual fees
totalling
over US$200 million, over 2,000 employees, 62 offices in
29
countries, and its own "Environmental Practice Group", is the
world's
largest PR company -- includes among its clients Scott
Paper,
TetraPak, Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the
Environment,
Shell, the Government of Indonesia, and the British
Columbia
Forest Alliance (a forest industry front group created by
Burson-Marsteller).36
The
practice of setting up of fake "environmentalist" groups with
a
pro-industry agenda (including "astroturf" grassroots groups,
named
after the artificial grass used in some US sports arenas),
well-established
in some Southern countries, is currently
spreading
in the North.37 Among the founding donors of the Center
for
Defense of Free Enterprise, the leading think tank and
training
centre for "Wise Use" groups, are Georgia-Pacific and
Boise
Cascade, the world's third- and twelfth-largest pulp and
paper
firms (see "The 'Wise Use' Backlash", pp.150-156). The ploy
of
cultivating public hostility towards activists by framing them
for
various outrages including bombings and corruption --
historically
used widely by Southern security apparatuses against
local
environmentalists, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
against
US black, native American, and civil rights movements, and
by the
UK's MI5 against trade unions -- is likely to be used more
extensively
in the future against Northern environmentalists as
well.38
Creating
a Social Environment
Today's
large pulp and paper firm, like a biological organism, is
constrained
by its inheritances -- including immense, unwieldy
machines
and a reliance on wood fibre -- and owes its survival
largely
to other organizations with which it has evolved in
cooperation
or symbiosis (see Box, pp.146-147). Like a plant or
animal,
such a company does not adapt passively to a fixed
environment,
but, with the help of its allies, constantly
recreates
it -- undermining forms of power necessary for
stewardship
of local land while extending the realm of uniform
rules
of exchange; constructing new financial, physical, legal,
and
cultural networks by which resources and subsidies can be
pumped
to central locations and new forms of influence exercised
over
workers and resisters; recanalizing customs and dreams into
forms
satisfiable through paper consumption; and attempting to
substitute
public relations for the risks of democratic debate.
Large,
destructive technologies, rocketing consumer demand and the
growing
phenomenon of globalization are products less of
"economics"
than of politics.39
BOX: A
Web of Actors
Large
as pulp and paper firms are -- 50 paper companies today
account
for half of world production, and the sales of the
biggest,
International Paper, rank above the Gross Domestic
Products
of more than 75 countries -- they cannot by themselves
open
the far-flung sites of production they exploit or capture the
subsidies
they require. Lending a hand are a flock of other
private
and public organizations, each with its own interests.
Forestry
and Engineering Consultancy Firms
Consulting
companies help propose, plan, design and set up pulp
and
paper mills or logging and plantation operations for the rest
of the
industry, along the way lobbying governments, finding
subsidies
and linking the interests of international and national
business
and governments.
Finland's
Jaakko Poyry is the largest such firm in the world, with
over 60
offices in 25 countries around the world, an estimated 40
per
cent of the forest industry consultancy market worldwide, and
a 1994
turnover of US$300 million. Poyry's networks are wide and
its
record one of constant political machination. In 1994, for
example,
the firm, although it had no previous experience in
India,
was selected over 15 Indian bidders to carry out World Bank
forestry
projects in Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. The officer in
charge
of Bank forestry programmes in India was a former
vice-president
of the Jaakko Poyry Group, Christian Keil. India's
Inspector
General of Forests, A. K. Mukerji, meanwhile, had
recently
been a guest of Poyry in Finland and was reportedly
preparing
to open a branch of the firm in India upon his
retirement
from the civil service.
The
better they succeed in using public monies to establish or
expand
industrial forestry or pulp and paper sectors, the more
private-sector
work consultants are assured in the future. In
1984,
for example, Poyry won a contract from the World Bank to
make
recommendations for the pulp and paper industry in Indonesia;
a
decade later, the company was in the thick of an unprecedented
boom in
massive pulp-related private sector projects on Sumatra
and
Kalimantan.
Suppliers
of Pulp- and Paper-Making Technology
The
dominant suppliers of machines to the pulp and paper
industries
tend to be based in the same Northern countries as the
consultancy
firms. Finland's Ahlstrom and Valmet-Tampella, for
instance,
are among the world's leading suppliers of pulping and
bleaching
equipment, while the Swedish-Swiss giant, Asea Brown
Boveri,
manufactures power and process control machinery. Most of
the
hundreds of millions of dollars spent to build and plan the
wood
supplies for each giant new pulp mill, South or North, winds
up in
the hands of such suppliers, with the majority share going
repeatedly
to Scandinavian, Japanese and North American firms and
consortia.
Industry
Associations and Alliances
Organizations
such as the European Confederation of Paper
Industries
(CEPI), the American Forest and Paper Association, and
the
Thai Pulp and Paper Industries Association help firms win
subsidies
from governments, tackle public relations, assess
markets,
influence environmental regulation, and prevent
environmentalists
from dividing industry over issues such as
recycling
and chlorine-free paper production. Sweden's pulp and
paper
associations, eager to gain more political clout in Brussels
at a
time when the industry is rapidly internationalizing
throughout
Europe, were influential in persuading the country to
join
the European Union.
Bilateral
Aid Agencies
While
aid departments are driven by conflicting bureaucratic,
foreign
policy and "foreign aid" goals, their principal function
in the
nexus of pulp and paper is to "launder" public monies used
to pay
for the work of Northern corporations in the South.
Finland's
FINNIDA and Sweden's SIDA, for instance, have bankrolled
Finnish
and Swedish firms' plantation and pulp and paper mill
planning,
exports and technical services for countries such as the
Philippines,
Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Zambia, Kenya, Viet Nam,
Mozambique
and Tanzania. Japan's JICA, meanwhile, has provided
handouts
for Japanese plantation research, planning and trials in
Chile,
Uruguay, Paraguay, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and other
countries,
while its Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund has
subsidized
Japanese corporate wood chip consortia. Without such
subsidies,
many forestry consultants and pulp and paper equipment
suppliers
would not survive. Accordingly, bilateral aid agencies
often
compete fiercely with each other to ensure that their
corporations'
services are the cheapest offered to Southern
elites.
State
Investment or Export Credit Agencies
Other
official organizations provide additional assistance. When a
paper-cycle-related
economic recession engulfed Finland in the
early
1990s, for example, the country's Premixed Concessional
Credit
Scheme helped equipment suppliers such as Tampella, Valmet,
Sunds
Defibrator and Ahlstrom find new outlets in Asia. Annual
Finnish
machinery exports to Indonesia surged from nil to over
US$95
million between 1990 and 1993, while those to Thailand
increased
nearly fivefold over the same period. Similarly, the
state
Finnish Fund for Industrial Cooperation is backing the
partly
state-owned Finnish paper giant Enso Gutzeit in a joint
venture
to develop a 1,390-square-kilometre acacia pulpwood
plantation
in western Kalimantan on a site riven by conflicting
land
claims.
The
US's Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and
Export-Import
Bank, meanwhile, are helping to lubricate an
inter-governmental
deal which will result in the US industry's
sending
billions of dollars' worth of pulp and paper, logging and
other
machinery to Siberia in exchange for Russian wood. Britain's
Commonwealth
Development Corporation (CDC), which draws around 45
per
cent of the more than #150 million it invests annually
directly
from the British "aid" programme and the remainder
largely
from profits made on aid-budget seed money, has invested
in
pulpwood plantation companies in Asia and Africa.
Multilateral
Agencies
Multilateral
development banks (MDBs) such as the Asian
Development
Bank, the World Bank and the European Bank for
Reconstruction
and Development also shower taxpayers' money on
consultancy,
construction and machinery firms. Northern firms,
backed
by their government bureaucracies, have a particular
advantage
in competing for these windfalls. US directors of MDBs,
for
example, have been instructed to impress on the banks the
virtues
of "one-stop shopping" at US firms, while a satellite
industry
of consultants -- many of them former World Bank staff or
the
spouses of current staff -- is on hand to help supply inside
information
on MDB procurement. MDBs and Northern governments, in
addition,
hold regular meetings in Northern capitals to help the
Banks
and prospective Northern contractors get to know each
other.
In
recent years, industry consultants have received funds from
MDBs
and other multilateral agencies such as FAO and UNDP to
research
business opportunities or plan or execute
industry-benefiting
forestry development schemes in more than a
dozen
African, Asian and Latin American countries.
National
and State Governments
Governments
end up furnishing some of the most important subsidies
for the
pulp and paper industry. In the last decade, for example,
the
Canadian province of Alberta has bestowed over $145 million in
infrastructure
gifts and $400 million in debentures on Japanese
paper
corporations and joint ventures. An additional $47.1 million
has
been committed by Canadian governments for public relations
for
overseas forest industries extracting Canadian pulpwood.
Under
the prodding of MDBs, meanwhile, Southern governments have
set up
or augmented state institutions which subsidize the growth
of local
and foreign commercial elites. Thailand's Board of
Investment,
for example, provides tax write-offs, technology
import
exemptions, and rent-free loans to pulpwood or pulp
industries
whose activities often erode the livelihoods of rural
dwellers.
As Thai economist Pasuk Phongpaichit notes, such actions
fly in
the face of economics:
"Economic
theory tells us it's all right to subsidize education
because
it benefits the whole society. But while eucalyptus and
pulp
and paper industries earn profits for some, they cause
problems
for society. Therefore, economic theory tells us, they
should
be taxed. But instead the government does the opposite.
This is
matter of influence and power".
Many
forestry departments, in addition, divert the vast swathes of
land
over which they have jurisdiction towards industry, and away
from
their occupants or from other uses. In Indonesia, 70 per cent
of
whose land is managed by the state forestry bureaucracy,
industry
is charged as little as US$0.30 per square kilometre per
year
for the use of plantation land, and plantations are further
subsidized
with revenue gained from logging.
Costs
of land and labour are also kept down in many countries
through
subsidies provided to military and police forces by local
or
foreign taxpayers. State university forestry faculties or
research
organizations -- often run by foresters trained
exclusively
in industrial forestry in countries such as Finland,
Canada
and the UK and sometimes even benefiting from direct
industry
support -- can be relied upon to provide useful lobbying
and
technical support for commercial schemes.
Sources:
Pulp and Paper International; World Resources Institute;
The
Nation (Bangkok); The Statesman (Delhi); Financial Times;
Jaakko
Poyry; Finland National Board of Customs; Jakarta Post;
Commonwealth
Development Corporation; World Bank; UK Department of
Trade
and Industry; Interforest; Taiga News.
BOX:
Technology
Paper
does not intrinsically require huge machines, large
technocracies,
extensive road networks, intercontinental marketing
mechanisms,
or the mining of vast amounts of raw material in
single
locations. China, for instance, still supplies its immense
paper
needs largely through small local mills which use mainly
surplus
local agricultural wastes such as straw, support community
economies,
require no advanced infrastructure to support them,
and,
like village bakeries, can safely shut up shop temporarily
when no
one is buying without the proprietors needing to worry
about
paying off their machinery investments. While effluent
treatment
is negligible, there are no overwhelming technical or
economic
obstacles to running such mills cleanly.40 Paper
manufacturing
expert A. W. Western, moreover, has argued that in
India
and other Southern countries, "detailed comparisons between
the
large mill and the equivalent capacity in small mills
overwhelmingly
favour the smaller unit in economic terms".
According
to researcher Maureen Smith, there are no purely
technical
obstacles even to curent US paper and paperboard
"demand"
being met by a more decentralized network of small- to
medium-sized
mills using a raw material base of approximately half
waste
paper and half non-wood crops including straw, hemp, or
other
regionally-appropriate materials.40
Notes
and References
1.
MacIsaac, R. and Champagne, A., eds., Clayoquot Mass
Trials: Defending the Rainforest, New
Society Publishers,
Gabriola Island, BC, (Jon Carpenter,
Oxford), 1994.
2.
Pulp and Paper International (PPI), September 1994,
October 1994; Wright, R., "New Markets:
New Developments --
Indonesia", presentation at Financial
Times conference on World
Pulp and Paper, May 1994; Rasmusson, U.,
Swedish/Scandinavian
Involvement in Indonesian Forestry -- The
Industrial Forest
Plantation and Pulp Mill Sector, WWF,
Stockholm, 1994.
3.
Such critics include economic and social historians such
as Karl Polanyi and E. P. Thompson,
economists such as J. K.
Galbraith, and a wide range of
anthropologists and
sociologists.
4
Buchanan, A., Ethics, Efficiency and the Market, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1985, pp.36-46.
5.
Hills, R. L., Papermaking in Britain 1488-1988, Athlone
Press, London 1988; Hunter, D. Papermaking:
The History and
Technique of an Ancient Craft, Dover, New
York, 1978;
Clapperton, R. H., The Paper-Making Machine:
Its Invention,
Evolution and Development, Pergamon, Oxford,
1967.
6.
Western, A. W., Small-Scale Papermaking, Intermediate
Technology Information Services, Rugby,
1979.
7
Ibid., p.26.
8
Ibid.
9.
International Institute for Environment and Development,
The Sustainable Paper Cycle, draft report
for the Business
Council on Sustainable Development, IIED,
London, 1995; Ayres,
E., "Making Paper without Trees",
WorldWatch, September/October
1993, pp.5-8; Durning, A. T. and Ayres, E.,
"The Story of a
Newspaper", WorldWatch,
November/December 1994, pp.30-32;
Wright, R., personal communication.
10. Van Hook, M., presentation at Financial
Times conference
on
World Pulp and Paper, May 1994.
11. Olsson, R., ed., The Taiga Trade A Report
on the
Production,
Consumption and Trade of Boreal Wood Products, Taiga
Rescue
Network, Jokkmokk, Sweden, 1995; PPI, July 1994.
12. Zerner, C., Indigenous Forest-Dwelling
Communities in
Indonesia's
Outer Islands: Livelihood, Rights, and Environmental
Management
Institutions in the Era of Industrial Forest
Exploitation,
unpublished report commissioned by the World Bank,
1992;
Lohmann, L., "Peasants, Plantations and Pulp", Bulletin of
Concerned
Asian Scholars 23, 4, 1991, pp. 3-17.
13. Fletcher, H., "The Pulp and Paper
Industry: A New Zealand
Perspective",
in Schreuder, G. F., (ed.), Global Issues and
Outlook
in Pulp and Paper, University of Washington, Seattle,
1988;
The Economist, 14 January 1995; Financial Times, 17 February
1995.
14. Wright, R., "World Pulp Market:
Forecasts and Prospects as
at
Mid-1992", Paper and Packaging Analyst 14, 1993, pp.13-19.
15. Under pressure from newspaper buyers, EC
investigators
recently
launched investigations into alleged price-fixing among
newsprint
produers. See Financial Times, 27 April 1995.
16. Clark, D., "Editorial", Appita
Journal, 47, 3, 1994.
17. Hunter, D., op. cit. 5, p.385.
18. IIED, op. cit. 9.
19. WorldWatch Institute, Vital Signs,
Norton, New York,
1994.
20. IIED, op. cit. 9; Pereira, W. and
Seabrook, J., Red Ink in
the
"Blueprint for a Green Economy", CHS, Bombay, n.d.
21. Olsson, R., op. cit. 11; Niku, P.,
"Worldwide Review of
Recycled
Fibre", Know-How Wire: Jaakko Poyry Client Magazine 1,
1993.
The technical upper limit for this ratio is probably not
much
more than 50 per cent; because wood fibres become shorter and
weaker
as a result of recycling, pulp made from waste paper must
often
be mixed with fresh, long-fibred pulp before being
manufactured
into paper.
22. Fairlie, S., "Long Distance, Short
Life: Why Big Business
Favours
Recycling", The Ecologist 22 (6), November/December 1992,
pp.276-83.
23. Calculated from Japan Paper Association,
Pulp and Paper
Statistics
1994, JPA, Tokyo; Japan Pulp and Paper 30 (1); Penna,
I.,
Japan's Paper Industry: An Overview of Its Structure and
Market
Trends, Friends of the Earth Japan, Tokyo, 1992; Marchak,
M. P.,
"Latin America and the Creation of a Global Forest
Industry"
in Steen, H. K. and Tucker, R. P., eds., Changing
Tropical
Forests: Historical Perspectives on Today's Challenges in
Central
and South America, Forestry History Society and
International
Union of Forestry Research Organizations, New York,
1992;
Schreuder, G. and Anderson, E., "International Wood Chip
Trade:
Past Developments and Future Trends, with Emphasis on
Japan"
in Schreuder, G., (ed.), op. cit. 13; Japan Tropical Forest
Action
Network, "Report on Eucalyptus Plantation Schemes in Brazil
and
Chile by Japanese Companies", JATAN, Tokyo, 1993.
24. Hagler, R., "Global Forest",
Papermaker, May 1993,
pp.40-46;
Hagler, "What is Determining International
Competitiveness
in the Global Pulp and Paper Industry?",
Proceedings
of the Third International Symposium, Center for
International
Trade in Forest Products, Seattle, 13-14 September
1994.
25. Grant, J. et al., Paper and Board
Manufacture, British
Paper
and Board Industry Federation, London, 1978; Axberg, G. N.
and
Stahl, P. H., "How Much Wood Does Your Forest Yield?" in
Know-How
Wire, January, 1989, pp.11-13; Graham, Alastair, "Wood
Flows
around the Pacific Rim: A Corporate Picture", WWF, Cygnet,
Tasmania;
Shell International Petroleum Company and World Wide
Fund
for Nature, Tree Plantation Review, Study No. 3: Industrial
Wood,
Shell and WWF, London, 1993.
26. Wilson, R. A., "Managed Forests:
Economic and Ecological
Aspects",
paper presented to the World Pulp and Paper
Environmental
Conference, Leningrad, 16-17 April 1991.
27. IIED, op. cit. 9; PPI, July 1994; United
Nations
import-export
figures, 1994; Wright, R., op. cit. 14.
28. Carrere, R. and Lohmann, L., Pulping the
South: Tree
Plantations
in the Third World, World Rainforest Movement and Zed
Books,
(forthcoming).
29. Fernandez Carro, O. and Wilson, R. A.,
"Quality Management
with
Fibre Crops", TAPPI Journal,
February 1992, pp.49-54.
30. Carrere and Lohmann, op. cit. 28.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Shell and WWF, op. cit. 25.
34. Weyerhaeuser Company, Weyerhaeuser Report
1994, Tacoma,
1995.
35. Public Relations Watch (PRW), Oct-Dec
1993 and Second
Quarter
1994.
36. Ibid.
37. PRW, Fourth Quarter 1994.
38. Churchill, W. and van der Wall, J.,
Agents of Repression,
South
End, Boston, 1988; New Statesman, 25
November 1994.
39. The author would like to thank Teresa
Brooks, Ricardo
Carrere,
Alastair Graham, John Hanson, Sonoko Kawakami, M.Patricia
Marchak,
Saskia Ozinga, Ian Penna, Noel Rajesh, Ulf Rasmusson,
Sarah
Roberts, Maureen Smith, Rowan Tilly, Jeremy Whitham, Alex
Wilks,
Al Wong, the Heinrich Boll Foundation, the Taiga Rescue
Network,
and many others for invaluable help.
40. Western, A. W., op. cit. 6; Smith, M.,
"The Paper
Industry:
Agenda for Reform", in Rainforest Action Network, Cut
Waste,
Not Trees: How to Save Forests, Cut Pollution and Create
Jobs,
San Francisco, 1995; Wong, A., "New Directions in Industry
Development
and Environmental Protection for Non-Wood Pulp Mills
in
Developing Countries", Arbokem, Inc., Vancouver, 1992.
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