Environmental NGOs lash out at Mozambique’s first eucalyptus shipment to Portugal

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Environmental NGOs lash out at Mozambique’s first eucalyptus shipment to Portugal

7:50 CAT | 16 Jul 2021

File photo: The Portugal News

Mozambican and Portuguese environmental groups, supported by international coalitions, have reserved “strong criticism” for Mozambique’s first shipment of eucalyptus from the port of Beira, in Mozambique, Quercus announced this Wednesday.

The wood, unloaded in Aveiro and destined for the ‘Navigator’ company, comes from eucalyptus plantations operated by Portucel Moçambique, a subsidiary of Navigator, and will be used in pulp and paper mills in Portugal. Two more shipments are expected this year, making a total of 100,000 cubic metres of wood, the environmental organization revealed.

Portucel Moçambique operates a 356,000-hectare concession in the provinces of Manica and Zambézia in central Mozambique, where it is introducing eucalyptus plantations. The area is more than three times larger than that which the company controls in Portugal, where so far only 13,500 hectares have been planted, according to a statement from Quercus.

Anabela Lemos, director of the Mozambican non-governmental organization (NGO) Justiça Ambiental, remarks that Portucel Moçambique claims that the plantations “are improving the living conditions of rural communities”, but the “reality” is that “this neo-colonial project is grabbing land and livelihoods from thousands of peasant families, leaving them with no options”.

“While peasant families lose everything of value, Portucel exports low-price wood, transported more than 11,000 kilometres to supply Navigator factories in Portugal, while also claiming to be contributing to development. The promises of jobs, better lives and improved infrastructure made to the communities were all broken,” the activist’s statement claims.

NGOs working in Mozambique, Portugal, and other countries, “called on the Mozambican government to revoke the land concessions of Portucel Moçambique due to the negative impacts that the plantations are having on the livelihoods and food security of local agricultural communities”.

“In all concession areas, 24,000 families could be impacted by the future expansion of the plantation,” they estimate.

Paula Silva, from Quercus in Portugal, also mentioned in the statement, denounces the export of the “model of eucalyptus plantation in Portugal” to Mozambique, with high “costs” for “communities and for biodiversity” in the country.

“We don’t want the Navigator Company to reproduce in Mozambique or anywhere else the impact it had in Portugal, where decades of influence over politicians have led to the deregulation of the forestry sector and huge impacts on the environment,” the Portuguese activist says.

João Camargo, of the climate justice collective for Climáximo, has similarly harsh words.

“Despite the enormous publicity effort, industrial forest plantations are not a solution to the climate crisis. They are not forests, and they have only one objective: to make a profit, even if this implies the destruction of native forests, soils, waters and communities. It is the pulp business model, the capitalist looting model.”

The NGOs called on the World Bank to withdraw financial support for Portucel’s plantations, noting that “the International Finance Corporation, owned by the World Bank, controls about 20% of the shares in Portucel Moçambique, and the Forest Investment Program, another Bank initiative, is helping to finance the planting of the first 40,000 hectares”.

The NGOs end their statement with a comment on the irony that the planned eucalyptus plantations are part of “Mozambique’s promise to ‘restore the forests'”, in the context of the ‘Bonn Challenge’* and of the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative**, both launched with the signing of the UN Paris Agreement in 2011.

* The ‘Bonn Challenge’ is an initiative intended to restore 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested land worldwide by 2020, and 350 million hectares by 2030.

** The AFR100 African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative is a country-led effort to restore 100 million hectares of deforested and degraded landscapes across Africa by 2030. AFR100 will accelerate restoration to enhance food security, increase climate change resilience and mitigation, and combat rural poverty.

Source: Lusa