Planting Progress? The Everyday Impacts of Plantation Forestry on Small Farmers in Interior Uruguay

Introduction

One winter's day in June 2011, I found myself travelling down the narrow rural road running from the city of Mercedes in Uruguay's Littoral region to the farming community of Pensé, eight kilometers away. Ariel, a member of ASODERN (Association for the Defense of Natural Resources) and his wife, Veronica, a community nurse, drove me in their pick-up truck to conduct an interview with Coto, a dairy farmer opposed to the growing plantation forestry in Uruguay. As we approached our destination, we passed a small trailer at the side of the nearby schoolhouse that functioned as the community's makeshift health center, and as Veronica knew the nurse on duty, we stopped to talk to her about the area's biggest health concerns as the site of one of the two largest concentrations of plantations in the department of Soriano.

I had already heard many anecdotes regarding the plantations' impacts on the land. However, I had not considered what I was about to be told. Sitting inside the trailer, the nurse recounted how the number of children coming in with hygiene-related conditions was on the rise. The cause? The diminishing amounts of water available to community members meant that parents could not bathe their children regularly, leading to an increase in poor health and preventable disease. These indirect impacts on local communities were to become the focus of my research and, while it was clear that the effects were widespread, the official literature on the industry's potential consequences on local communities made little mention of them.

Highlighting such unforeseen social and economic consequences of the rising afforestation in Uruguay, this article argues that, unlike the official report on the sustainable model of the UPM pulp mill or the promotion of monoculture plantations as viable forests, there are consequences far beyond what the environmental impact assessment measures. While such reports do acknowledge the possibility of social impact, they have not gone far enough in demonstrating the level of negative consequences facing the communities most directly impacted by the plantations. In order to effectively measure the impacts of such industries, anecdotal information must be taken seriously alongside scientific quantitative measurements.

Discussion

The roots of the timber industry in Uruguay can be traced back to the Forestry Law created in 1987. It built off a previous law established 19 years earlier and promotes plantation forestry, consisting of large-scale monoculture plantations of alien trees. As a result, the country's forestry industry has boomed in the last two and a half decades. Afforestation between 1989 and 1992 was eight times greater than the average annual rate from 1979 to 1988 and currently there are more than a million hectares of artificially forested land, ¹ or more than half of the country's total forested area. Of this, eight timber companies possess 720,000 hectares, with 200,000 of those in the hands of Finnish UPM-Kymmene and another 250 thousand in the hands of Montes del Plata, ² both of which own pulp mills in Uruguay. ³ In Soriano department specifically, where I was based for nearly seven months during my 14 months of fieldwork, there are approximately 40,000 hectares of plantation forest, up from 18,626 in 2000 and 26,428 in 2007, ⁴ changing what was once an expanse of low-growing grassland into high-growing monocultures of eucalyptus trees and pine.

With plantation forestry firmly established in the country, the pulp industry soon followed. ENCE of Spain received approval in 2003, followed by Botnia (now UPM-Kymmene, or UPM) in 2005. The ENCE project was delayed, but Botnia's Orion plant began producing pulp in 2007. While the projects required an Environmental Impact Assessment by the government and a Cumulative Impact Study by the International Financial Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank Group, the latter investing $1.2 billion in the Orion project, their conclusions have been an area of debate. The final reports do acknowledge the possibility of social and cultural consequences of the mill project, but treatment is surface, with any non-biological impacts appearing as almost an afterthought, particularly in regards to the plantations. Plans to monitor and test physical impacts are laid out, for example, as are rules about preserving native forest, but negative social impacts are almost treated as an unfortunate and unavoidable consequence.

This, of course, is problematic since the physical changes to the environment also speak to cultural shifts taking place in Uruguay of late. Anthropologists, such as Escobar, have demonstrated the emplacement of all cultural practices, that is, how personal and cultural identity is tied up with place through an active engagement with it. ⁵ Landscapes are both physical and social, reflecting historical-geographical struggles and social powers and geometries ⁶ and thus, micro-practices matter. In Uruguay, the traditional agricultural and livestock industry is more than an economic phenomenon; it is also closely linked to people's histories and narratives. Environmental impacts do not just affect the physical elements but change community relations and wreak havoc on people's sense of self worth and identity.

Up until recently, farming was typically a generation-to-generation practice in Soriano. There was a sense of community because everyone knew the families they were working and living alongside. But this is changing. The pulp mill and forestation threaten not only a form of labor and livelihood, but also impact on people's “social networks, family history and sense of belonging.” ⁷ One of the most notable social impacts has been the change in community structures as small family farms disappear, replaced by one large farm with an absentee landlord often from abroad.

Coto explained the changes to me one afternoon while I was visiting his farm: “In 1974 the landscape was totally different. There used to be quite a few families living in this area, just four or five kilometers away, and I knew them all…in the road out front, there were eight different parcels of land. Now this land produces eucalyptus, but before it produced wheat, sheep, cattle, and was used for cattle fattening. There were over 8,000 hectares in smaller vegetable growing plots. There used to be an almacen (corner store) and it was the social centre of the community, there was also a football club and a horse-riding club…Now I can look around and for a ten kilometer radius there aren't even enough people to form a soccer team.” There is certainly statistical information to back up Coto's experience. In 1961, there were 87,000 farms in Uruguay; by 2000 that number had dropped to just 57,000. ⁸ And according to the 2011 census, the department of Soriano's rural population has been declining, with a population of 6,612 rural residents, as opposed to 8,267 just seven years earlier, a process that has been described as an “emptying” of the rural areas. ⁹ By 2011, nearly 95 percent of Uruguayans were urban-based.

With his 75-hectare farm surrounded on two sides by eucalyptus plantations, and on the two other by large soy fields, Coto is one of many who have felt the profound impact of the increase in intensive large-scale monoculture on the land and landscape. Small-scale farmers have been particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts, themselves unable to participate in these alternative markets (like timber but also soy) because they lack the space to diversify—although many would hasten to add they also lack the desire to engage in the destructive industry even with the large profits to be made. Instead, they find themselves (and their livestock) having to renegotiate their relationship to, and practices on, the land.

The harmful impacts of the plantation forestry have been endless, and I heard stories that further support the well-documented findings by environmental organizations: there were anecdotes of cattle herds' grazing patterns being affected because the tight concentration of trees in plantations prevents their usual movement from one area to another; of wells and fields that have provided water for decades drying up because of the water-intensive eucalypti ¹⁰ (by 2006, there were already 146 families documented as being without water in the farming communities along the highway leading to and from Mercedes); ¹¹ of livestock suffering from higher rates of death due to the increase in the number of foxes and poisonous snakes finding shelter among the dense trees; ¹² and of crops rotting because there are no transport trucks available to take them to market with so much timber to be moved. Meanwhile, farmers' organizations have all but disappeared as their numbers dwindle (a reality that I confronted time and again throughout my fieldwork, as I was told that organizations I had intended to meet with were either no longer active or completely disbanded), while security concerns increase as small farmers become increasingly isolated from their neighbors who once provided a watchful eye or deterrent to theft.

Beekeepers have been particularly hard hit. They have lost access to the land they once rented from cattle and sheep farmers, as animal husbandry is replaced by monoculture plantations whose investors and owners have no relationship with the community members. They have also lost access to valuable markets as a result of the changes in the surrounding agriculture. Javier, a beekeeper living in Mercedes, told me, “Germany has now stopped buying our honey,” referring to a German study that was released that year. ¹³ “And not just—everything that's in the soy, and the same goes for the eucalypti, it's of genetically modified origin, you see? It's all genetic manipulation…The honey, you see, comes from everything; the bee gathers the nectar and pollen…And if you'd like to know of what botanical origin it is, the little grains of pollen are taken out…and you can see precisely if it's genetically modified.”

As the plantations continually expand, people have been forced to sell their farms, a result of either depleting soil conditions from the monoculture, leading to an inability to pay off debts and/or produce goods, or indirect pressure as they find their land being closed in by the growing plantations. This move from the farm to the city has taken a toll on many small farmers. Contact between people and their environment is an interaction that alters both parties, connecting to the history and content of each one. Stories about humans and nature frequently focus on the former's dominance and mastery over the latter, but such interactions are actually part of complex relations of dependency and interdependency and thus also impact and alter people. ¹⁴ The reality is, how farmers and ranchers interact with and care for their animals, crops, and the land shapes, in many ways, how they live, experience the landscape, and identify themselves, highlighting the articulations of belonging among animals, crops, soils, and souls. ¹⁵ As such, it was unfortunately common for me to learn of farmers living in Mercedes who fell into depression or “lost their dignity” when they stopped farming their own land and moved into town. ¹⁶

Yet, such problems are downplayed or ignored in assessments on the sustainability of the pulp and timber industry. Reports by Botnia/UPM, the International Financial Corporation and the National Directorate on the Environment (DINAMA) on the Orion mill project all concluded that the it was environmentally sound due to the systems in place to monitor and measure the potential impacts of the pulp mill based on expert findings. As long as the impacts (water usage, contamination, and so forth) fell within the standards as laid out by governing bodies such as CARU (Administrative Commission of the Uruguay River), they were considered to be acceptable. Additionally, the ability to certify the tree plantations through an internationally standardized body working in the name of sustainability (the FSC or Forest Stewardship Council) was deemed as further proof that the pulp and forestry industry would be environmentally sound and a good economic investment for the country.

The experience of small producers like Coto and Javier and the documented evidence clearly suggest otherwise. So how do such critical accounts of the impacts of pulp and monoculture production get overlooked in the process for approval? Fougère and Solitander point out that the dependence to technical and scientific knowledge inadvertently leads to confusion and omission of key information: While the thick documents produced for the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) give the impression of “rigorous objective reporting,” they argue that the reports are really “masquerading for accountability.” ¹⁷ As they note, “[t]he assessment draws on insights from different sciences (such as biology, geology, hydrogeology, social sciences and economics) making it hard even for individual scientists to fully understand all implications. As a result, reviewing the assessment requires close examination by several experts.” ¹⁸ Such “technological rationality” can work to sidetrack ethical concerns (such as the impacts of pulp and forestry industry on local farmers an communities) and depoliticize the process by deferring to a technical, formulaic analysis of issues. By removing the ideological bias that guides the reports' conclusions, scientific findings are read as neutral and therefore more legitimate. ¹⁹

Fortunately, there is work being done to counter this. Montevideo-based environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Grupo Guayubira of the World Rainforest Movement and REDES—Amigos de la Tierra (Friends of the Earth), in solidarity with local volunteer organizations in the interior, have documented the impacts of plantation forestry on communities in addition to organizing events and protests around the issue. While more structured volunteer groups in Soriano are no longer functioning in many cases, there are still small farmers and volunteers working to ensure that people hear about the everyday consequences of the monoculture and pulp production on their communities. However, the battle against the industry remains one of a struggle between David and Goliath and there is still more that needs to be done.

Conclusions

UPM recently asked the Uruguayan government for permission to increase its annual pulp production from 1.1 million to 1.3 million tons. This request has once again stirred the debate as to how much cellulose production can be legitimately seen as environmentally sustainable as the Argentine residents across the river and the mill argue that it will bring more contamination into their country. Uruguayan President Mujica has said that he is considering support for expansion of the mill's production while UPM has once again been named one of the top companies in regards to sustainability and corporate responsibility by the Dow Jones European and World Sustainability Indices (DJSI) for 2013–14 and as an environmental leader by the Paper and Forest Products sector. ²⁰ While no final word has been given, Mujica has said he could be in favor of at least a partial expansion. All of this points to a decision likely in favor of the company. ²¹

Yet, perhaps not all is lost. Bringing the pulp and timber industry once again into the forefront of discussion in Uruguay means providing an opportunity, even if small, for other, dissident voices to be heard. Impacts of the industry are once again being reevaluated, both by the government and in public opinion. If Mujica is truly interested in economic development that is socially and environmentally sustainable, as his party has promised, then it should expand its assessment beyond quantitative data presented in Montevideo and start listening to the experiences of those in the interior who are most directly affected.