Pulp, Paper and Power
How an Industry Reshapes its Social Environment

Summary

The drive of the pulp and paper industry towards larger scale and global expansion cannot be explained solely by “economics”. But neither is it being driven by a political conspiracy of powerful masterminds in transnational corporation boardrooms. Social structures sensitive to the needs of pulp and paper elites are built, expanded and improved upon through the political efforts of a multitude of agents with different interests and motivations, working together in an ad hoc, sometimes uncoordinated way against an ever-varying background of resistance. Close attention to this dynamic is crucial to the success of environmentalists’ efforts to reduce the damage done by the industry.

Contents

• Introduction
• Machine Politics
• Reorganizing Landscapes
• Influencing Demand
• Table 1: How "global" is "global consumption"?
• Surfing on Resistance
• Freedom to Plant
• Engineered Consent and Astroturf Groups
• Creating a Social Environment
• Box 1: A Web of Actors
  • Forestry and Engineering Consultancy Firms
  • Suppliers of Pulp- and Paper-Making Technology
  • Industry Associations and Alliances
  • Bilateral Aid Agencies
  • State Investment or Export Credit Agencies
  • Multilateral Agencies
  • National and State Governments
• Box 2: Technology
• Notes and references

 

Introduction

In recent years, the expansion of the pulp and paper industry has provoked increasing opposition throughout the world. In Europe, South-East Asia, and South and North America, campaigns are gaining momentum to reduce dioxins and other toxic compounds produced by the use of chlorine in the paper-making process. In Canada, 932 people arrested for protesting against logging for pulpwood near Vancouver Island's Clayoquot Sound went before the courts in the summer of 1993 in the largest mass trial in Canadian history.¹ In Indonesia, environmentalists and local people are alarmed at the planned pulping of over 6,000 square kilometres of native hardwood stands on Sumatra and Kalimantan by the turn of the century,² while the expansion of monoculture pulpwood plantations is rousing opposition from Chile, Brazil and the Dominican Republic to Portugal, Finland, India and Australia.

The response of apologists for the pulp and paper industry to this outcry relies partly on several assumptions about the industrial economy, namely that:

• Companies do not alter society's goals and needs but leave them untouched; they merely provide wealth, goods and jobs which help society do better what it is doing already.
• It is the drive to do so efficiently and competitively which causes such firms to increase the size of paper machines and to seek cheaper production sites around the world.
• Any social and environmental disruption which results from this expansion requires at most some adjustments to the market apparatus or state regulatory systems, not a rethink of the industry's scale, structure or political relationships with the rest of society.

Such assumptions have long been under attack by affected people and critical social scientists. These critics point out that, far from passively responding to consumer demand, public consensus and government regulation, modern corporations have a deep interest in forming and managing them, and that, rather than creating wealth for all, such firms typically survive only through hidden handouts from public coffers.³ In these circumstances, the pulp and paper industry's defence that, through seeking profits, it is merely increasing society's "efficiency" in meeting the pre-existing needs of its members becomes highly questionable.⁴

The industry's current drive towards larger scale and global expansion cannot be explained solely by "economics". But neither is it being driven by a political conspiracy of unseen masterminds in transnational corporation boardrooms acting with the careless ease of omnipotence. Social structures sensitive to the needs of pulp and paper elites are built, expanded and improved upon only through the political efforts of a multitude of agents with different interests and motivations, working together in an ad hoc and sometimes uncoordinated fashion against an ever-varying background of resistance. Close attention to this dynamic is likely to be crucial to the success of environmentalists' efforts to reduce the damage done by the industry.

Machine Politics

The evolution of pulp and paper technology has always been intertwined not merely with profit but with the attempt of small elites to rearrange structures of power in their favour. For example, although a boom in publishing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had contributed to an increased demand for paper which the prevailing artisanal, rag-based technology could not easily meet, Nicholas-Louis Robert's invention of the forerunner of the modern paper-making machine near Paris in the late 1790s was, by his own account, neither a profit-seeking response to demand for more paper nor an attempt to replace scarce rags with other raw material. Rather, it was an attempt to undercut the power restive paper artisans held at a time of revolution by centralizing paper-making technique in the hands of factory owners.⁵ It was not until the late nineteenth-century development of commercial techniques for pulping wood, a material which could be harvested at any time and easily stored and shipped in great volume, that the full potential of the new machine began to be realized.

The switch to wood as a raw material reinforced papermakers' reliance on large, highly-mechanized mills -- for one thing, the chipping equipment and stone grinders used to process logs produced too much pulp for small paper mills to absorb.⁶ Yet the more that the pulp and paper industry invested in huge, wood-adapted pulp and paper machines, integrated with the timber industry and decoupled from any other source of raw materials, the less inclined the trade became to consider any other approach.

Early twentieth-century paper machines tended to be both standardized and profitable. But competition among newspaper magnates in North America and Britain to build ever-bigger paper machines soon escalated. The huge machines became less and less cost-effective: not only were many of them "one-offs", but their huge widths and speeds -- by 1937, machines could produce a kilometre-long sheet of paper 7.7 metres wide in little more than two minutes -- also required sophisticated and expensive controls for efficient operation. As British paper expert A. W. Western remarks:

"no logical reasons can be traced for increasing size to this extent. Labour costs have often been quoted, but machine labour was then, and still is, a relatively small proportion of overall costs. More likely reasons ... were pride and prestige."⁷

Between 1930 and 1975, as the technological race continued, the cost per annual tonne of a newsprint machine increased at least 40-fold while the price of newsprint itself increased less than 20-fold. Yet the major machine manufacturers' investment in large machine tools had by now made it difficult for them to produce for anyone but the largest paper investors. As Western concludes, building new paper machines:

"became a luxury which could be afforded only by multinational giants or the governments of developing countries, advised by consultants that only scale to this degree could be economic! For the consultants, it was economic: they were now essential for large mill design and coordination."⁸

Nicholas-Louis Robert's nearly 200-year-old dream of concentrating paper-making power in the hands of plant owners, in short, had been realized with a vengeance. Access to the dominant stream of papermaking knowledge was now restricted not just to capital, but to big capital. For many capital-short Southern societies with interests in meeting their own paper needs efficiently with indigenous materials and technology, the implications were particularly bleak.

Reorganizing Landscapes

Today, 90 per cent of paper pulp is made of wood, either by grinding it up or chipping and boiling it in strong chemicals. Large quantities of fresh water and energy are required for the process, which consumes annually the rough equivalent of the timber that would cover 20,000 square kilometres of wooded land, an area half the size of Switzerland. Paper manufacture is estimated to account for nearly 13 per cent of total wood use, and represents one per cent of the world's total economic output.⁹

Most of the pulped wood which is used to manufacture newsprint, packaging board and writing paper flows from a small number of sprawling plants, shining with expensive, computer-assisted machinery and costing up to US$1 billion apiece. In the United States, whose world-leading output of 58 million tonnes of pulp per year is supplied by a mere 203 mills, the pulp and paper industry is more capital-intensive than any other.¹⁰ New mills in Indonesia, Brazil and Canada are no less capital-intensive, some of them requiring capital investments of US$750,000 or more for each employee.¹¹

The giant pulping machines at such plants have to be run nearly 24 hours a day if the massive debts incurred in their construction are to be paid off on schedule. This reinforces the mills' need for secure access to huge supplies of nearby water and wood. Hence the mills must not only be sited on large rivers, but must also have access to large, more or less contiguous timberlands. Much pulp and paper manufacture in both North and South is thus closely integrated with the timber industry, is sited in countries which are strongholds of industrial forestry practice such as Germany, Sweden and Canada, and tends both to promote and be promoted by government bureaucracies which grant large logging concessions to big corporations.

Pulp mills find it difficult to share the landscapes they occupy with local communities pursuing a variety of agricultural, fishing and subsistence-gathering activities. Large mills work better with simplified, compact populations of factory-friendly trees, for example, than with native woodlands reserved for a variety of uses. They demand the construction of roads or waterways which run straight from cutting site to port or factory instead of a web of slow systems of transport linking one local area to another. They favour the growth of mill towns where everyone works for the industry rather than communities with diverse livelihoods. The ideology of an industry dominated by large mills, finally, tends to be one which privileges a supposedly "global" demand for pulp over varied local demands for individual farm plots, diverse native woodlands, clean water and air, and the maintenance of fine-grained craft practices which make possible local control over native forests and wetlands.

The pulp and paper industry often justifies its preference for large-scale, single-centred systems over many-centred social mosaics by claiming that they help release latent economic "efficiencies". From the point of view of a farmer in, say, South-East Asia, however, the engineering of such centralized systems may well be a fighting matter, entailing uncompensated losses of water, soil, fodder, fish, transport, or livelihood generally.¹² For such a farmer, as for the paper artisan made redundant by Robert's paper machine, retrospective talk of "efficiencies" would likely be viewed as anachronistic, a way of writing out of history what are more accurately described as bitter, prolonged political and cultural struggles between radically different social systems.

Influencing Demand

Just as the pulp and paper industry, as organized today, cannot easily fit its production into a social mosaic of locally-organized landscapes, so too it cannot easily accommodate itself to "market demand". What with the easy availability of debt finance, the lack of need to buy into brand names, the sheer scale of each new state-of-the-art mill, and the temptation of many firms to become price-setters, any surge in demand during the last few decades has invariably resulted in more investment in productive capacity than is actually required to meet it.¹³

One consequence is a savage boom-and-bust cycle. In 1993, for example, after the most recent bout of overinvestment, pulp prices dropped to half of what they had been four years previously,¹⁴ leading to rampant losses, cost-cutting, closures, mergers and takeovers. Although prices have now climbed once again to record levels, many industry figures fear that a new round of overspending is on the way. With the enormous equipment costs and long lead times required to bring huge new mills and pulpwood plantations on stream -- over two years and 10-15 years respectively -- it is not surprising that the industry feels growing pressure not only to invest more wisely, cooperate on pricing¹⁵ and develop better relationships with buyers, but also to plan demand in a way which might moderate future price dips. As David Clark of the European Confederation of Paper Industries recently told his colleagues, the industry must:

"fight for our future and create our own growth ... total demand has to be stimulated. The alternative, to do nothing, could produce a static or even declining demand with serious implications for the industry, its reputation, its technology and the quality of the people it attracts."¹⁶

In this way, large scale becomes a cause as well as an effect of efforts to reorganize society in ways friendly to a few central actors.

Stimulation of paper demand is, however, nothing new, and is not something the industry has to undertake alone (see Box). Ever since wood-based pulps inaugurated an age of cheap, large-scale paper production in the mid-1800s, new commodities -- ranging from paper shirt collars, building materials, bags, toilet paper, drinks cartons, nappies, fax and computer paper, and export packaging -- have been embedding paper use ever more thoroughly into business and household activities.¹⁷ In 1991, over 40 per cent of world paper production was used for packaging and wrapping, while only 30 per cent went for printing and writing and 13 per cent for newsprint, with increasing volumes of all three categories going for advertising.¹⁸

Tying demand for paper to a broad range of economic activities outside publishing has helped free world per capita paper consumption to expand indefinitely. Rising from .01 kilogrammes yearly in 1910 to 15 kilogrammes in 1950 and around 46 kilogrammes in 1993,¹⁹ it shows no signs, unlike per capita sawnwood consumption, of levelling off. "Efficiency" can no longer be plausibly described as, say, "efficiency in producing the medium for the books which society needs", but is increasingly merely an ability to produce as much paper as possible as cheaply as possible.

Unsurprisingly, per capita paper consumption is not a good index of literacy, being perhaps a better indicator of what conventional development economists consider "economic success" (see Table). In 1993, the South plus Eastern Europe, with 84 per cent of the world's people, consumed less than a quarter of its paper and board, while the North plus the fast-growing Asian "tigers", with just over 16 percent of the world's people, accounted for over three-quarters. US citizens, while they consume 43 times as much oil as Indians, consume a full 386 times as much pulpwood.²⁰

Surfing on Resistance

Opposition to the pulp and paper industry's plans and operations -- like demand, infrastructure, labour unrest and state regulation -- constitute an important part of the industry's evolutionary environment, one which it is constantly seeking to modify.

Certain types of resistance are fairly easy for large actors in the industry to eliminate or circumvent, simply by redistributing their ample resources from one place to another. By themselves, such types of resistance often even wind up favouring conditions which lead to increased concentration or centralization of the industry and its support networks -- a development which, in the end, may be far from environmentally benign.

In Europe, to take one example, agitation and legislation against the industry's air and water pollution is being treated by a few far-sighted companies not as a political threat but as an economic opportunity. Hoping to transform anti-chlorine sentiment into a huge demand for totally chlorine-free pulp, for instance, the Swedish firm Sodra Cell, has invested in cleaner technology of a type affordable only by the biggest corporations. If companies such as Sodra succeed, they are likely only to strengthen their centralizing hold on land, forest and other resources.

By the same token, honouring the call for more paper recycling is not an unmanageable strain for an industry accustomed for over a century to using waste paper as a raw material and now being given increasing economic incentives to do so. Due largely to environmental pressures, the ratio of waste paper to other raw materials rose from 18 per cent in 1970 to 32 per cent in 1988, and continues to climb (though it has always been high in many Southern countries).²¹ Yet because recycling is now conducted within a regional or global economic system integrated largely around the interests of a few central actors, it often involves such environmentally dubious practices as transporting huge amounts of waste paper between the US and China.²² The dumping of large amounts of waste on the international market, as happened as a result of recent environmental legislation in Germany, can also easily disrupt small local paper-collection attempts.

Environmentalist resistance to the pulp and paper industry's exploitation of forests in one country, similarly, by itself tends merely to encourage companies with sufficient resources to try to organize fibre production on a hemispheric or global scale. The most striking instance of this tendency is the expanding wood-fibre network centred on Japan.

The growth in Japanese annual paper consumption from 47 to 121 kilogrammes per capita between 1960 and 1970 was largely dependent on developing sources of raw material in the US Pacific Northwest as alternatives to expensive local fibre. But as these sources started, in turn, to become less economically, politically and biologically accessible in the 1980s (due to sawmill slowdowns, domestic competition for wood residues, forest depletion, and, finally, environmental resistance and legislation), Japanese industry consortia began to build up joint fibre ventures in Canada, Oceania, South-East Asia and Latin America -- many of them lavishly subsidized by "foreign aid". By 1989, when a second surge in domestic consumption had brought yearly per capita consumption of pulp and paper to 222 kilogrammes, Japan was importing wood chips or pulp from sources as far-flung as Brazil, South Africa, Fiji, Finland, Thailand and the South-Eastern US. Faced by rural protests in Thailand, and fearing rising environmentalism in Australia and Chile, Japanese companies were also laying plans to secure supplies from the interior of northern Canada, Viet Nam, Siberia, Argentina, Venezuela and West Papua. Today, the average wood fibre embedded in a sheet of Japanese paper or cardboard has travelled more than 6,000 kilometres from its point of origin.²³

As native forests are exhausted and local resistance provoked, pulp and paper industries are turning increasingly to industrial tree plantations to furnish large amounts of fresh, uniform raw material on a smaller land base, avoiding conflict with other land uses. Although industrial plantations currently supply considerably less than a quarter of world demand for pulpwood, this proportion is bound to rise, given deforestation, the limitations of recycling (fibres can only be reused a few times before disintegrating into dust), and the resistance of much of the industry to non-wood materials.²⁴

This shift to plantation pulpwood provides more incentives for the industry to move raw fibre production to new regions, especially to the South. In countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, trees such as eucalyptus or acacia grow faster, land is cheaper, and companies are able to benefit from lower-cost labour and severer political repression than in the North.²⁵ All this entails low prices for wood, which, as Robert A. Wilson of the Anglo-French conglomerate Arjo Wiggins Appleton remarks, is "the strategic driver in the industry ... the key competitive differentiator."²⁶

Pulp mills are often integrated with the new Southern plantations. This is not only because it makes more economic sense to combine wood and pulp production than to keep them separate, and to export fibre in the more concentrated form of pulp than in the watery form of wood chips, but also because environmental regulations are looser in the South than in the North, foreign aid subsidies easier to obtain, and consumption, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, likely to grow faster. Thus Brazil, Chile, Portugal, New Zealand and South Africa, none of whom have been traditionally strong in the pulp and paper industry, are now among the top nine exporters of pulp, their principal customers being in industrialized countries. Indonesia, meanwhile, whose production of pulp grew at an average rate of 29 per cent yearly between 1980 and 1991, is already one of the top seven world paper shippers.²⁷

Resistance provoked by this shift to the South, of course, presents the industry with still more problems. Providing it is scattered, however, it can often be handled fairly easily. Pulp or pulpwood businesses in South-East Asia, for example, have blunted community resistance by approaching individuals with money, land, goods or jobs, or by setting up gambling schemes to relieve plantation opponents of their money. More intransigent opponents have been subjected to beatings, murder threats, accusations of treason or Communism, or harassment of their families by government employees or even religious leaders. If resistance to seizures of land for plantations is stubborn yet isolated, small-scale, poorly-coordinated, and out of the domestic or international public eye, military suppression may result; if protests are more widespread and well-coordinated, contract farming schemes may be rolled out instead as a way of gaining local people's active collaboration in raw material production.²⁸

Freedom to Plant

Other sorts of resistance are more difficult to deal with. No paper corporation, faced with coordinated, publicly-visible opposition to the development of large-scale, new industrial pulpwood plantations across large areas of the globe, can buy it off everywhere it arises, smash it completely, or shift its search for raw materials to another planet. Nor can the industry, as presently constituted, countenance an open and persistent discussion of reducing or even stabilizing demand for pulp and paper in industrialized countries. Skewed world paper consumption must remain, for paper executives, evidence not that high consumers are consuming too much but that low consumers are consuming too little.

Just as today's pulp and paper industry cannot acquiesce in existing demand or existing social mosaics, so, too, it cannot simply "surf" on these more threatening types of opposition, translate them into "economic signals", or evade them by shifting operations elsewhere. Rather, its network must actively colonize the society of such resisters just as its network infiltrates societies of consumers or of subsistence farmers.

Here a subtler strategy comes into play: that of divide and conquer. The idea is to discredit or suppress critics; cultivate critics' potential, but as yet uncommitted, allies; and block communication and alliances between the two groups -- for instance, between critics of plantations in the South and their potential allies among environmental organizations in the North. Thus Arjo Wiggins Appleton pulpwood plantation executives O Fernandez Carro and Robert A Wilson urge their colleagues not to target "apparent opposition" if that means "forgetting the vast mass in between: the public". Politics, they continue:

"provides the packaging and the vehicle to achieve the industrial objectives. Success is measured by the freedom to plant fibre crops, recognizing the sum total of all the political forces (in the broadest sense). There are two elements to the political subsystem: the message and the target. The message needs to be short, nontechnical, and fundamental: for example, 'Trees are good. We need more trees not less'. Our objective should be to create and move inside an ever-increasing friendly circle of public opinion".²⁹

In creating such a "friendly circle of public opinion", the industry often benefits from a global reach longer than that of its critics in the South. Industry spokespeople, for example, frequently attempt to seek support from urban or Northern audiences, including environmentalists, by affirming that pulp production has nothing to do with logging natural forests in the South, insisting disingenuously that new trees which have been planted on "degraded" and "unused" land are used instead. Isolated from grassroots groups in the South and from internal industry discussions, most Northern environmentalists have been unable to reply with the facts, namely that:

• most of the giant new Scandinavian-planned export pulp mills in Sumatra are being fed in their initial stages by mixed tropical hardwoods;³⁰
• in Chile, Brazil and Indonesia, the way has often been cleared for monoculture pulpwood plantations by logging native forests;³¹
• in Thailand and elsewhere, the establishment of plantations on farmland, pasture or commons has often driven the inhabitants to clear natural forests elsewhere;³²
• the industry is little interested in investing in "degraded land" but rather, in the words of Shell International, in "land suitable for superior biological growth rates for those species the market wants" as well as "year-round water" and easy access to nearby processors or ports.³³

Engineered Consent and Astroturf Groups

To help colonize democratic discussion and replace it with a more predictable type of interchange, pulp and paper companies and industry associations have also set up public relations (PR) operations in all major national markets. The object is not merely to "engineer consent" -- using such means as advertising, lobbying, purchasing expert testimony, distributing press releases, commissioning books, manipulating journalists, launching opinion polls and creating "community advisory panels"³⁴ -- but also to monitor industry critics, with an eye to weakening their links to other sectors of the public.

In 1993, for example, Finnish consulting firm Jaakko Poyry began publishing a confidential quarterly intelligence report on environmentalist thinking and activities, aimed at a clientele of wealthy companies. Industry-retained PR firms also maintain files on activist groups, their leaderships, methods of operations, anticipated reactions to new products, funding sources and "potential for industry relationship", with a view to finding out "what's motivating them, how serious they are, what they will consider 'success'".³⁵ Such firms advise pulp and paper corporations and their allies on how to offer financial support to environmentalist groups which need funding and "respectability", as well as how to go about putting critical individual environmentalists or former regulators on their payrolls.

PR companies may also infiltrate environmental meetings in the guise of activists or "housewives" to gather information or "guide" discussions; pose as journalists in order to obtain previews of research results which might be damaging to industry; or sabotage promotional tours of books critical of industry. One such firm, the US's Burson-Marsteller -- which, with annual fees totalling over US$200 million, over 2,000 employees, 62 offices in 29 countries, and its own "Environmental Practice Group", is the world's largest PR company -- includes among its clients Scott Paper, TetraPak, Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment, Shell, the Government of Indonesia, and the British Columbia Forest Alliance (a forest industry front group created by Burson-Marsteller).³⁶

The practice of setting up of fake "environmentalist" groups with a pro-industry agenda (including "astroturf" grassroots groups, named after the artificial grass used in some US sports arenas), well-established in some Southern countries, is currently spreading in the North.³⁷ Among the founding donors of the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise, the leading think tank and training centre for "Wise Use" groups, are Georgia-Pacific and Boise Cascade, the world's third- and twelfth-largest pulp and paper firms (see "The 'Wise Use' Backlash"). The ploy of cultivating public hostility towards activists by framing them for various outrages including bombings and corruption -- historically used widely by Southern security apparatuses against local environmentalists, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation against US black, native American, and civil rights movements, and by the UK's MI5 against trade unions -- is likely to be used more extensively in the future against Northern environmentalists as well.³⁸

Creating a Social Environment

Today's large pulp and paper firm, like a biological organism, is constrained by its inheritances -- including immense, unwieldy machines and a reliance on wood fibre -- and owes its survival largely to other organizations with which it has evolved in cooperation or symbiosis (see Box). Like a plant or animal, such a company does not adapt passively to a fixed environment, but, with the help of its allies, constantly recreates it -- undermining forms of power necessary for stewardship of local land while extending the realm of uniform rules of exchange; constructing new financial, physical, legal, and cultural networks by which resources and subsidies can be pumped to central locations and new forms of influence exercised over workers and resisters; recanalizing customs and dreams into forms satisfiable through paper consumption; and attempting to substitute public relations for the risks of democratic debate. Large, destructive technologies, rocketing consumer demand and the growing phenomenon of globalization are products less of "economics" than of politics.³⁹

Notes and References

1 MacIsaac, R. and Champagne, A., eds., Clayoquot Mass Trials: Defending the Rainforest, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, (Jon Carpenter, Oxford), 1994.

2 Pulp and Paper International (PPI), September 1994, October 1994; Wright, R., "New Markets: New Developments -- Indonesia", presentation at Financial Times conference on World Pulp and Paper, May 1994; Rasmusson, U., Swedish/Scandinavian Involvement in Indonesian Forestry -- The Industrial Forest Plantation and Pulp Mill Sector, WWF, Stockholm, 1994.

3 Such critics include economic and social historians such as Karl Polanyi and E. P. Thompson, economists such as J. K. Galbraith, and a wide range of anthropologists and sociologists.

4 Buchanan, A., Ethics, Efficiency and the Market, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985, pp.36-46.

5 Hills, R. L., Papermaking in Britain 1488-1988, Athlone Press, London 1988; Hunter, D. Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, Dover, New York, 1978; Clapperton, R. H., The Paper-Making Machine: Its Invention, Evolution and Development, Pergamon, Oxford, 1967.

6 Western, A. W., Small-Scale Papermaking, Intermediate Technology Information Services, Rugby, 1979.

7 Ibid., p.26.

8 Ibid.

9 International Institute for Environment and Development, The Sustainable Paper Cycle, draft report for the Business Council on Sustainable Development, IIED, London, 1995; Ayres, E., "Making Paper without Trees", WorldWatch, September/October 1993, pp.5-8; Durning, A. T. and Ayres, E., "The Story of a Newspaper", WorldWatch, November/December 1994, pp.30-32; Wright, R., personal communication.

10 Van Hook, M., presentation at Financial Times conference on World Pulp and Paper, May 1994.

11 Olsson, R., ed., The Taiga Trade A Report on the Production, Consumption and Trade of Boreal Wood Products, Taiga Rescue Network, Jokkmokk, Sweden, 1995; PPI, July 1994.

12 Zerner, C., Indigenous Forest-Dwelling Communities in Indonesia's Outer Islands: Livelihood, Rights, and Environmental Management Institutions in the Era of Industrial Forest Exploitation, unpublished report commissioned by the World Bank, 1992; Lohmann, L., "Peasants, Plantations and Pulp", Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 23, 4, 1991, pp.3-17.

13 Fletcher, H., "The Pulp and Paper Industry: A New Zealand Perspective", in Schreuder, G. F., (ed.), Global Issues and Outlook in Pulp and Paper, University of Washington, Seattle, 1988; The Economist, 14 January 1995; Financial Times, 17 February 1995.

14 Wright, R., "World Pulp Market: Forecasts and Prospects as at Mid-1992", Paper and Packaging Analyst 14, 1993, pp.13-19.

15 Under pressure from newspaper buyers, EC investigators recently launched investigations into alleged price-fixing among newsprint produers. See Financial Times, 27 April 1995.

16 Clark, D., "Editorial", Appita Journal, 47, 3, 1994.

17 Hunter, D., op. cit. 5, p.385.

18 IIED, op. cit. 9.

19 WorldWatch Institute, Vital Signs, Norton, New York, 1994.

20 IIED, op. cit. 9; Pereira, W. and Seabrook, J., Red Ink in the "Blueprint for a Green Economy", CHS, Bombay, n.d.

21 Olsson, R., op. cit. 11; Niku, P., "Worldwide Review of Recycled Fibre", Know-How Wire: Jaakko Poyry Client Magazine 1, 1993. The technical upper limit for this ratio is probably not much more than 50 per cent; because wood fibres become shorter and weaker as a result of recycling, pulp made from waste paper must often be mixed with fresh, long-fibred pulp before being manufactured into paper.

22 Fairlie, S., "Long Distance, Short Life: Why Big Business Favours Recycling", The Ecologist 22 (6), November/December 1992, pp.276-83.

23 Calculated from Japan Paper Association, Pulp and Paper Statistics 1994, JPA, Tokyo; Japan Pulp and Paper 30 (1); Penna, I., Japan's Paper Industry: An Overview of Its Structure and Market Trends, Friends of the Earth Japan, Tokyo, 1992; Marchak, M. P., "Latin America and the Creation of a Global Forest Industry" in Steen, H. K. and Tucker, R. P., eds., Changing Tropical Forests: Historical Perspectives on Today's Challenges in Central and South America, Forestry History Society and International Union of Forestry Research Organizations, New York, 1992; Schreuder, G. and Anderson, E., "International Wood Chip Trade: Past Developments and Future Trends, with Emphasis on Japan" in Schreuder, G., (ed.), op. cit. 13; Japan Tropical Forest Action Network, "Report on Eucalyptus Plantation Schemes in Brazil and Chile by Japanese Companies", JATAN, Tokyo, 1993.

24 Hagler, R., "Global Forest", Papermaker, May 1993, pp.40-46; Hagler, "What is Determining International Competitiveness in the Global Pulp and Paper Industry?", Proceedings of the Third International Symposium, Center for International Trade in Forest Products, Seattle, 13-14 September 1994.

25 Grant, J. et al., Paper and Board Manufacture, British Paper and Board Industry Federation, London, 1978; Axberg, G. N. and Stahl, P. H., "How Much Wood Does Your Forest Yield?" in Know-How Wire, January, 1989, pp.11-13; Graham, Alastair, "Wood Flows around the Pacific Rim: A Corporate Picture", WWF, Cygnet, Tasmania; Shell International Petroleum Company and World Wide Fund for Nature, Tree Plantation Review, Study No. 3: Industrial Wood, Shell and WWF, London, 1993.

26 Wilson, R. A., "Managed Forests: Economic and Ecological Aspects", paper presented to the World Pulp and Paper Environmental Conference, Leningrad, 16-17 April 1991.

27 IIED, op. cit. 9; PPI, July 1994; United Nations import-export figures, 1994; Wright, R., op. cit. 14.

28 Carrere, R. and Lohmann, L., Pulping the South: Tree Plantations in the Third World, World Rainforest Movement and Zed Books, 1996

29 Fernandez Carro, O. and Wilson, R. A., "Quality Management with Fibre Crops", TAPPI Journal, February 1992, pp.49-54.

30 Carrere and Lohmann, op. cit. 28.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Shell and WWF, op. cit. 25.

34 Weyerhaeuser Company, Weyerhaeuser Report 1994, Tacoma, 1995.

35 Public Relations Watch (PRW), Oct-Dec 1993 and Second Quarter 1994.

36 Ibid.

37 PRW, Fourth Quarter 1994.

38 Churchill, W. and van der Wall, J., Agents of Repression, South End, Boston, 1988; New Statesman, 25 November 1994.

39 The author would like to thank Teresa Brooks, Ricardo Carrere, Alastair Graham, John Hanson, Sonoko Kawakami, M.Patricia Marchak, Saskia Ozinga, Ian Penna, Noel Rajesh, Ulf Rasmusson, Sarah Roberts, Maureen Smith, Rowan Tilly, Jeremy Whitham, Alex Wilks, Al Wong, the Heinrich Boll Foundation, the Taiga Rescue Network, and many others for invaluable help.

40 Western, A. W., op. cit. 6; Smith, M., "The Paper Industry: Agenda for Reform", in Rainforest Action Network, Cut Waste, Not Trees: How to Save Forests, Cut Pollution and Create Jobs, San Francisco, 1995; Wong, A., "New Directions in Industry Development and Environmental Protection for Non-Wood Pulp Mills in Developing Countries", Arbokem, Inc., Vancouver, 1992.

 

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