Deceit and destruction behind FAO’s forest definition

/deceit-destruction-behind-faos-forest-d

  • Day of Real Forests: A Photo Essay
    https://towardfreedom.org/archives/environment/day-of-real-forests-a-photo-essay

    Monoculture tree plantations like these eucalyptus farms pictured here from South Africa are a big threat to forests and a driver of deforestation. Unlike natural forests which are biodiverse and provide a habitat to a web of life of many species of plants and animals, these monoculture plantations support barely any life. These are typically large-scale intensively managed plantations with endless rows of only one species- mostly exotic fast-growing trees like pine or eucalyptus among others, destined for industrial production of commodities like paper or palm oil. They suck the groundwater up, leaving barely anything for animals and people living nearby.

    The UN Food and Agriculture Organization considers such plantations to be forests, on a par with real forests (as its definition of forest only considers tree cover and height rather than the other critical functions). But people around the world are demanding that the UN reconsider its definition and stop incentivising commercial plantations which have been expanding rapidly under the guise of “reforestation” and “forest restoration” at the cost of real forests.

    #forêt #plantation #définition #biodiversité

    • For decades, the WRM has demanded that the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) urgently reviews its forest definition, which mainly benefits the interests of industrial monoculture tree plantations companies. FAO’s definition reduces a forest to any area covered by trees. In doing so, the FAO definition discards other life-forms as well as the biological, cyclical and cultural diversity that define a forest in its continuous interconnection with forest-dependent communities. FAO’s reductionist definition also allows the companies behind tens of millions of industrial fast-growing plantations to claim their monocultures are “planted forests”. Countries’ forest statistics thus count these industrial monocultures as “forests”, in spite of the well-documented social and environmental impacts such plantations have caused around the world. The United Nations (UN) declared March 21st as the International Day of Forests in 2013. At the WRM, we are taking this day as another opportunity to expose FAO’s misleading forest definition.

      https://intercontinentalcry.org/deceit-destruction-behind-faos-forest-definition