MONTEVIDEO, May 25 (IPS) – Whats wrong with planting trees?
ask the promoters of commercial monoculture forestry, an industry that is gaining ground throughout South America. In Uruguay, there are no definitive answers, but all signs indicate that it is a problem of scale. Orderly rows of eucalyptus and pine trees are proliferating in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, representing 40 percent of the 10 million hectares of rapid-growth tree plantations worldwide. Unlike other forestry plantations, these are intended only to produce “fast wood” at low cost – huge quantities of slender tree trunks that serve as raw material for the cellulose used to manufacture paper. Latin American forestry policies, encouraged by multilateral institutions and international cooperation agencies, “increasingly focus on promoting monoculture (of pines, eucalyptus or other species) rather than on protecting native forests,” Ricardo Carrere, coordinator of the Montevideo-based World Rainforest Movement, WRM, told Tierramrica. “The reason is that the forest is seen
