Empty land? - The social and environmental impact of the Holterberg plantations

Feb 2008

According to the authors, the idea to write a paper on the social and environmental impact of the Holterberg plantations, an old monoculture tree plantation in the Netherlands, surged at a strategy meeting organized by the World Rainforest Movement in Espiritu Santo, Brazil, in November 2005. The meeting took place near one of the largest and most devastating monoculture tree plantations in the world, the Aracruz Eucalyptus plantations, which cover almost 80% of the arable land of the entire State of Espiritu Santo. A large number of representatives of the Indigenous Peoples and local communities that were affected by these plantations and other plantations in Latin America, Asia and Africa participated in the meeting. They shared impressive and sometimes dramatic stories about how large-scale tree monocultures had destroyed their lands and livelihoods.
In the strategy discussion that followed, it was noted that the case studies and other stories presented were all from the global South, although there are many monoculture tree plantations in Europe and North America too. In fact, in a country like the Netherlands the overwhelming majority of what is officially classified as "forests" consists of old monoculture tree plantations.
The lack of social resistance nowadays might be a logical result from the fact that in many of these plantation areas there are hardly any local communities left. The large-scale tree monocultures in Europe are amongst the most depopulated areas in this heavily populated continent. Depopulation is a common feature in large-scale monoculture tree plantation areas. This depopulation is a consequence of the fact that large-scale tree monocultures are an extremely labour-extensive form of land use: in Brazil, it has been calculated that they provide 800 times less employment per hectare than traditional agriculture. Rural unemployment and depopulation, and subsequent social disintegration, is one of the most dramatic effects of the expansion of large-scale monocultures like eucalypt plantations in Latin America and other continents.
The aim of this paper is to document some of the existing and historical environmental and social impacts of a typical European plantation, the Holterberg pine plantations, so as to increase awareness of the negative impacts of tree monocultures in general, and the need to distinguish between tree plantations and forests.

By: Global Forest Coalition

 
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