This is chapter 2 of my book, A Natural Language, which exposes the environmental narrative as propaganda and puts bottom-up solutions in front of the actual problem.
The aforementioned land grab concerns are legit. The powerful have been abusing the toolboxes of power to steal land from less powerful small farmers and tribal peoples since the dawn of written history. This continues to this day with business transactions that all too often look like legalized theft under a different name. Eminent domain and bankruptcy laws are the two classic ways to do this where the rule of law applies. In more lawless areas, simply encroaching on and squatting the land is not unheard of. Especially after clearing that land using violence, arson, illegal logging, or all of those. There are more insidious ways to grab land in between those two extremes. Suzano, a Brazilian logger, provides a good window into such processes.
Suzano’s unsavory interactions with communities and ecosystems is well documented. Biofuelwatch, a biofuel watchdog, and local indigenous rights activists produced a joint report in 2013 about Suzano’s eucalyptus plantations in Brazil’s Northeastern states of Maranhão and Piauí. The two areas have long been producing charcoal for nearby iron smelting activities tied to the Carajás mine. Suzano has been diversifying into wood pellets in recent years because of the European market. As with other parts of the world with a colonial past, large swaths of land in these two regions have never been “properly” registered. The legal arrangement in place is typical of such parts of the world: the land legally belongs to the state to protect incumbent occupants from land theft. A legal ramification of this arrangement is that traditional land occupants, such as the indigenous natives or the descendants of runaway slaves, are technically squatters, if nominally protected ones. The result is as you’d expect: a region plagued by conflicts between new land owners with land titles and traditional land occupants without.
In their joint report, the activists comb through all sorts of inflated land surfaces, fake transactions, and other tactics to steal land from traditional land occupants, as well as brazen strategies to evict the locals or drive them out by disrupting local ecosystems. The locals normally depend on the land around them for hunting, foraging, and grazing. In one case, a community ended up surrounded by lifeless eucalyptus plantations with a paltry 12 hectares (30 acres) to survive on. The World Rainforest Movement, which co-authored the report, also documented in separate reporting how Suzano sought to evict a coastal community against its will in order to build a private port to export wood pellets to Europe. The locals secured a ruling in their favor. Goons showed up in short order to terrorize them, and ended up demolishing some of their homes. The situation was so atrocious that Suzano ended up distancing itself from its local contractors.
In fairness to Suzano, they are by no means the only corporation that is acquiring land in sketchy ways in the Cerrado. Industrial farmers are fond of the region because it is savanna rather than rainforest. This allows them to supply agribusiness corporations like Cargill and ADM with “zero deforestation” certified feed for industrial meat outfits at home. The low land prices also attract foreign speculators through local intermediaries. These speculators are the familiar set of financial institutions that get bailed out using handouts and printed money each time the financial system collapses. The situation was so vexing that the World Bank stepped in a few years ago. True to its mission, which is to replace subsistence farming with capital intensive activities like plantations and mines, it extended a loan to help digitize the land registry to scale up regularization efforts. The land grabbing is now more streamlined.
Suzano operates tens of thousands of hectares of eucalyptus plantations in these two regions. This is a non-native species, but Brazilian loggers have long defended growing eucalyptus trees on the preposterous basis that it prevents deforestation. In truth, it’s just that the trees grow very fast. The Cerrado being a savanna, the local rainfall is not enough to support high density tree plantations. Suzano makes up for this shortfall by tapping into local water resources — to the detriment of the locals. Suzano grows its plantations in one of two ways: on a short harvest cycle for biomass, and on a longer one for pulp. Trees in biomass plantations don’t have the time to grow large, so Suzano packs them more tightly for optimal productivity. This puts more water and nutrient pressure on the land than pulp plantations. These biomass plantations are not on a short coppice cycle like the IEA suggests, but they are close in spirit. Aerial sprayings poison the locals and pollute soils and waterways. This is nothing unusual. Give or take what gets sprayed, this is how tree plantation operators work across the globe.
One point that sets Suzano apart is that it recently became the first corporation outside of China to grow genetically modified trees. The modification is about getting trees that yield more biomass rather than the more typical glyphosate resistance, at least for now. This is not necessarily a blessing. More tree growth means even more water (and nutrient) hungry tree plantations, in an area that doesn’t have enough water to grow tree plantations. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a corporate greenwashing outfit, refused to certify the genetically modified wood. Suzano has been seeking to get an exception to the FSC’s rule. The virtue signaling has stood thus far, but it’s not a stretch to imagine an outfit that is certifying Suzano’s millions of hectares of other tree plantations to amend its rules or find creative ways around them.
Another point that sets Suzano apart is its sustainability. Locals scoff at any notion that Suzano’s tree plantations might be anything of the sort, and regularly call out the FSC for rubber stamping Suzano’s wood. But in the FSC’s defense, its rules are not about certifying sustainable wood. They are about sanitizing legal logging done according to a checklist of rules, which Suzano’s activities happen to follow. Suzano’s credentials are otherwise based on corporate funded beauty prizes and accolades. World Finance, for instance, crowned Suzano most sustainable pulp & paper company the same year as Enviva got the prize for biomass. Big conservation outfits shower it with praise for its conservation efforts, too. One such effort is its mosaic growing system.
Suzano’s mosaic growing system revolves around growing tree plantations in between bands of native plants. It attracts scathing critics from locals, but this mosaic system actually has merit if done right. You can see it at work in the meadow-like bands on regenerative farms, in “rewilded” lawns, on roadsides. and other semi-wild places in industrialized countries. It’s a bit like providing a caged animal with just enough food to not starve. The result is less than stellar, but it stays alive. An easy to overlook detail about such semi-wild meadows is that trees will grow in them if you fail to mow them. They need to be managed, in other words. When you don’t manage nature at all, you end up needing to bring in hunters to keep predators in check, or with useless but aggressive plants that take over. This is actually where conservation efforts fall apart, in fact. Conservancies purport to “protect” nature from the very locals who were so prodigiously good at managing it. Suzano does more of the same. It fences out locals, which prevents them from accessing areas that they would have traditionally depended on — and more importantly, managed — for foraging, hunting, or grazing.
Summary | Next: Biomass Energy.