“You plant cork for your grandchildren, pine for your children, and eucalyptus for yourself.”
A local proverb
When, in the terrifying openness of my first few days ‘in the field,’ Paul told me this, sat on the terrace of the quinta, I thought I’d struck gold. It felt like a circuit board had lit up in my brain: this pithy aphorism seemed to be the stuff of ethnographic dreams. The succession from native to exotic, or from community values to the myopia of the economically rational individual resonated with many of themes we’d been covering in class the past year. The descent into individualism that the proverb conveyed felt depressingly neoliberal. I parked it in the back of my mind.
The eucalyptus solution
With pine’s rapid devaluation in the 1950s, eucalyptus quickly emerged as the timely “solution” to the country’s economic and social woes (Nunes et al., 2019). An innovation in the pulp and paper industry suddenly made it possible to turn the particular fibres of eucalyptus into pulp, the raw material used in various kinds of paper. This was a major boon for the industry: not only did eucalyptus yield double the pulp of pine, but it grew considerably faster and could be cut multiple times (Kardell, Steen, & Fabiao, 1986). They became like “cash machines” for the industry, as a 2015 company report announced (M. N. M. P. d. Silva, 2015). The innovation ushered in a new commodity frontier and a concomitant wave of planting, a wave the industry rode to a new place on the international market[1], eventually making Portugal a world-leader in the production of paper.
In the 1960s over a million people left in search of work – part of an exodus that some think was exacerbated by the failed pine project (Nunes et al., 2019) – leaving huge swathes of the land abandoned, ripe for invasion. In just two generations the municipality lost 50% of its population. My friend Vanessa, who was born not far from here, told me that back then, lifestyles had changed little for centuries: few had running water, electricity or indoor toilets; illiteracy was high, and only a minority had access to education. Progress meant moving to the cities, or to richer nations like France. For those who stayed, Progress was embodied in the fast growth of planted eucalyptus, which they hoped would offer a different kind of ‘way out’. To believe in Progress was to believe in eucalyptus.
The rise of pulp
At the time of the innovation in 1957, Portugal’s economy was primarily agrarian, with a focus on protectionist industry, and significant budget allocations for African colonial wars (Graham, Linz, & Makler, 1979, p. xvi). To fund these conflicts, the regime actively sought foreign investment, aligning Portugal with the postwar capitalist economy (ibid). Foreign investments surged tenfold in the decade leading to 1970, promoting legislation favouring eucalyptus plantation expansion (McGuire, 2013), often with foreign capital (Celbi, n.d.). Economic pressures drove the regime to embrace external investments, fuelling growth in transformative industries like pulp and the burgeoning tourism sector. Relishing the abundance of cheap land (and Cheap Nature (Moore, 2017)), multinational pulp companies, including Celbi, majority-owned by Swedish firm Billerud from 1967-2006, and national entities like Portucel (now The Navigator Company), began converting agricultural land into plantations, backed by funding from the World Bank and later the EU.[2]
As the weeks passed, and I spoke with more and more people about eucalyptus and their problematic place in Portugal, I’d think back to that proverb. It began to feel more and more out of place – too crude, even malign – in the picture that was emerging, and I was weary of falling into the trap of the ‘profligate native’. Sure, the succession of cash crop tree species was chronologically accurate, as was its placement in the symbolic order of trees. So too was the foreclosing of the future it expressed, and the shift toward more immediate economic gain. Yet time and again, when I asked who it was that owned eucalyptus, I was told in no uncertain terms: “everyone”. This wasn’t meant literally, but rather served to emphasise how incredibly ordinary it was: it was merely the current vogue cash-crop.
Escaping from the state
The fascist state had been pivotal in facilitating the early development of the industry. Already by 1945, new industrial policy had designated the industry as a “basic” industry, entitling it to government support; Marshall Plan financing was used to develop it, with investment into researching suitable types of wood (Gutiérrez-Poch, p. 222). However, Domingos told me that as the industry ballooned following the pulp innovation, it became increasingly difficult for the government to control their activities, such was their predominance in an export-led economy. Yet more pressingly for those against the onslaught, it also became near-impossible to differentiate between the two. Actors of the state and the pulp industry shuttled back and forth between a revolving door which blurred the boundaries between the public and private spheres. Many ministers of state held prominent positions in pulp companies, presenting huge conflicts of interest. Until 10 years ago, for instance, the general director of Biond, the industry’s association of pulp and paper companies, was the same man who, as Secretary of State for Forestry, approved a law to expand the area of eucalyptus plantations[3].
In the 1980s, the negative effects of eucalyptus plantations were beginning to rear their heads; villagers complained of wells drying up and rivers slowing down (Kardell, Steen, & Fabiao, 1986). Wildfires started getting bigger, and lasting longer, and people began to notice eucalyptusand their disregard for property rights. Paul, who has taken quite the interest in his alien neighbours, told me about their intensive management regime, but also about how their biological characteristics lend themselves to the different kinds of ferality.
Growing eucalyptus, cultivating ferality
Seedlings, most of which are cultivated in the Navigator Company’s nurseries from selectively-bred clones – they are the world’s biggest producer of eucalyptus seedlings (The Navigator Company, n.d.) – are planted in evenly-aged, single stand monocultures. They can then be coppiced three times, usually at intervals of between 8 and 12 years. The intensity of this management regime is nearly unrivalled in Europe and is a huge contrast from the “extensive” management of pine noted in the previous chapter.[4]
Each time they are coppiced (or burnt by fire), the trees re-sprout from basal buds in their trunk, producing new shoots of growth leading to multiple thinner trunks (Cerasoli et al., 2016). And each time they do so, the quality of the yield is reduced. (Growers are supposed ensure there is only one trunk, chopping off any extras, but this is rarely followed.) After three rotations, they need replanting. This involves removing the roots – a costly (often prohibitively so for nonindustrial owners) procedure.
Before arriving, I had read of eucalyptus’ labelling in the 1980s as the “fascist” and “capitalist” tree for its association with the regime and large landowning industrialists (Kardell et al., 1986). However, in the 1980s eucalyptus plantations covered just a third of their present extent (Kardell, Steen, & Fabiao, 1986). The association of eucalyptus with fascists and capitalists no longer seemed to have any bearing on who owned eucalyptus today. Eucalyptus plantations are now so widespread that the category of “eucalyptus plantation owner” no longer makes any sense. What’s more, it felt hard to square the warmth and friendliness of my elderly neighbours, with the selfish, greedy and short-sighted characterisation of people who planted eucalyptus. Often busy at work in their meticulously tended market gardens, these are not ornamental gardens: on the measly 400-euro pension of elderly folk in Portugal, these gardens provide much of their nutritional needs.
What I was being told was not matching the characteristics of eucalyptus planters as selfish, individualistic and short sighted. My Portuguese friends and interlocutors were often quick to point out the role of the pulp and paper industry, something the expats were often unaware of. I had to start looking further ‘upstream’.
Exploiting producers
My introduction to both the power and nasty tactics of the industry came by way of Domingos, who, in his activist capacity, has keenly followed their exploits. Domingos informed me that around 20 years ago, the industry decided to import pulp from South America. They claimed there was a domestic supply shortage – a claim that producers avidly refuted. The result: cheaper pulp, produced in different labour/regulatory setting, flooded the market, lowering the price and devaluing the investments of many of the producers. Because of the monopoly the industry has on pulp and other raw materials, they had no option but to sell short-changed. Unsurprisingly, when it came to replanting the trees, or indeed the trees were burnt by forest fire, there was no longer a sufficient financial interest to do so.
Salvage accumulation
Today, the pulp industry own and manage just 20% of eucalyptus plantations (J. S. Silva & Tomé, 2016). The remaining 80% are owned by many of the country’s 400,000 “small forest owners,” mostly in tracts of a hectare or less. Since 1983, the area covered by eucalyptus plantations has tripled, yet the pulp industry’s share in this remains largely unchanged. Similarly, the production of pulp grew from around 7 million tons to over 27 million (Branco, 2010). Clearly, accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005) – the original modus operandi of the plantation – is not at work. So, what happened?
In the early days, pulp firms offered to lease smallholders’ land, loaning them the money required to cover the initial planting costs (Nunes et al., 2019, p. 4). They would then manage the plantations themselves, paying the landowners a small income for their trouble (Brouwer, 1995). When the trees were ready to harvest, someone had to do the harvesting, another the transporting. Thus the economic benefit of the plantations seeped out into the local community, to the benefit of the many small, family-owned wood processing and transportation firms (J. S. Silva & Tomé, 2016).[5] The kinds of social relations that arise here are not really very capitalist at all: as many of my interlocutors noted, many draw on the labour of friends or family to maintain their plantations (if they do so at all); for harvesting and transportation, too, it is small family owned firms called in, who themselves are likely motivated by things beyond simply profit – this, after all, is hardly a guarantee.
At some point along the line – it’s unclear exactly when – pulp firms changed tack. As eucalyptus fever took hold through the 70s and 80s, and smallholders realised they could make a fast profit from the tree, pulp firms no longer thought it necessary to lease the land or lend money; the lure of the market and the buzz of eucalyptus fever was enough to entice smallholders into planting, and the pulp firms would be there to buy it all up (at a price of their choosing).
Thus smallholders were positioned as “ostensibly independent” (Tsing & Group, 2009, p. 347) subcontractors in a supply chain led by the pulp firms, to whom pulp production was increasingly outsourced. Such production is so cheap that it’s practically free: costs – economic as well as environmental – are kept ‘off the books’ (Moore, 2017), so the industry need only pay for the ready-to-pulp timber itself. And because it has a monopoly, it needn’t pay much. Such externalisation has long been central to how capitalism functions: it always needs a new “away” to exploit, but in today’s Portugal, there are no colonies left[6]. The outside of outsourcing – where things are outsourced to – then appears less as an externality and more as an insideoutside: it doesn’t need an overseas colony (distance), just an unregulated or noncapitalist island within (difference). There aren’t any regulations for how you manage your plantations in the pulp chain’s insideoutside, the kind that, as supposedly upright and environmentally sustainable corporations, they would otherwise be subject to (and to which their own managed plantations are held).
The pulp industry’s managed plantations are thus little more than a neatly-pruned veneer for a form of accumulation exacted through what Tsing has called “salvage”. Salvage accumulation enables us to describe the process through which this ‘insideoutside’ is transformed into capitalist wealth (Tsing, 2015a, 2015b). It enables the pulp industry to feed on both managed and un- or poorly managed plantations (which pose higher fire risks), making small meals of such binary oppositions. This means that when The Navigator Company claims that the fires happen outside their managed plantations, as they do in a recent promotional video, they are technically telling the truth. It’s just that the technology of supply chain capitalism serves their interests by obfuscating the commodity or accumulation processes in the insideoutside, connecting the precarity of smallholders with the prosperity of pulp (Tsing, 2011).
Salvage enabled the pulp industry to integrate a great deal (a recent survey in the nearby parish of Macão found 64% of respondents to be forest owners (Valente et al., 2015)) of the country’s many small forest owners into a supply chain, on hugely uneven, and often out right exploitative (i.e. importing foreign eucalyptus to lower prices here), terms. The ability of supply chains to link up the local, regional and global scales also means that pulp prices are “indexed to the global level,” and thus have little bearing on the actual costs borne by producers, not to mention the environment and its non-producing inhabitants. Domingos lamented that this makes it near impossible to compete with pulp producers in the global South. Domingos’ father planted eucalyptus when the fever took hold. When, about 20 years ago the pulp industry artificially deflated domestic pulp prices by importing cheaper pulp from abroad, there was little smallholders like his father could do. Here in the precarious insideoutside of the supply chain, there are no wages or any of the benefits, securities or rights which come with waged work. As independent subcontractors, smallholders’ position is outside the core operations of the industry, and thus its own corporate standards.
Offsetting risk
Alongside shirking regulations, pulp firms can also outsource risk. Investing in eucalyptus plantations comes with risk: the seedlings might not root successfully, or the trees might succumb to disease, an event that the monocultural arrangement of plantations actively foments (Brightman & Lewis, 2017). The pine plantations in front of the quinta are a case in point: having been plagued by the processionary pine caterpillar, which can be fatal to dogs, these ghostly relics of failed development dreams take on an altogether more monstrous quality for Paul and Julia, and their cherished canine companions[7]. The biggest risk of all, however, is that they are burnt by forest fire: on average, 3% of the country burns each year (Fernandes, Guiomar, & Rossa, 2019), and in these parts the risk is much higher (see chapter 6).
Supply chains enable the pulp industry to outsource these, and other, risks onto to smallholders, such that the industry can only win. For firms operating under the aegis of supply chain capitalism – and in an age dominated by finance, rather than production (or where power has shifted from producers to financiers) – outsourcing has become “the global standard” (Tsing, 2012, p. 52). From the recruitment and training of labour to the act of polluting or chance of catastrophe striking (ibid): firms must relinquish themselves of any unnecessary elements which may, through the inevitable risk they pose, get in the way of shareholder profits. This is vital to how corporations court finance: in a ‘race to the bottom’, only the most dressed-down of firms can find their way to the top of the outsourcing chain, which is almost invariably located somewhere in the global (qua European) North.
Abandonment and (corporate) ferality is just an “ordinary catastrophe”
The dirty tactics of the pulp industry also have ecological consequences.
As Domingos admits, for many smallholders losing their plantation to fire is not necessarily a catastrophe; “many smallholdings are half an hectare or less. If it burns, ok, I have a loss.” Few smallholders are reliant on the plantations for their livelihoods. The vast majority are retired, living on a small plantation, and engaging in semi-subsistence agriculture. That is, for the duration of the growing season, many smallholders are growing much of the produce they need to survive. “The bigger problem,” Domingos informed me, “is about what to do next: to replant it… that might cost thousands of euros.” Indeed, some have calculated that replanting eucalyptus after its three rotations can exceed the total income gained (Serra et al., 2017). The answer to all is glaringly obvious: if producers were paid better, they’d be managed better. But eucalyptus prices have been stagnant for a decade and have now begun to decrease. “Now, since 2017, I see many abandoned eucalyptus plantations – until 10 years ago, people replanted, they believed in it – now they don’t, they don’t replant, they abandon.” Without human management, their proliferous nature sees them form the “feral” forests which are visible in the landscape surrounding the quinta.
Abandoned plantations go feral, and it these feral stands that represent the highest fire risk among all forest types (Tomé et al., 2021). Feral plantations are unregulated, and complicate boundaries of ownership, responsibility, and accountability. Eucalyptus, alongside pine, increasingly went feral, breaching the bounds of their smallholdings to form vast tracts of wild, ‘zombie’ forest.[8] Such forest accounts for 77% of all forest burned (Mateus & Fernandes, 2014). Many of the small forest owners – most of whom own multiple patches, often in different locations – have long since moved abroad (Almeida, 2020) or to the cities following successive waves of (still ongoing) migration – a point frequently emphasised by my interlocutors. But perhaps a greater proportion simply can’t afford to manage them properly. In terms of forest management, nearly a quarter of owners do not actively manage their holdings, while nearly all the rest do so alone (Valente et al., 2015). The feral forests that form from abandonment, which then fuel wildfires, are an example of what Tsing calls “ordinary catastrophe”: “the planned devastation and makeshift, rubble economies that form an expectable feature of global supply chains“ (Tsing, 2012, p. 52). The ferality abandonment spawns is thus an “absolutely expectable” feature of the landscape of the insideoutside of pulp production which supply chains make possible (ibid).
Due to the fire risks posed by high levels of abandoned land, the government recently established a GPS land registration scheme (BUPI), in order to determine ownership, and reclaim or resell land where they see fit. But take up has so far been low amongst the Portuguese, in part over fears that reclaimed land would flood the market, lowering house and land prices. Expats, on the other hand, have avidly taken up the registration scheme, and the poor take-up amongst the Portuguese is a source of frustration. However, none of the expats I spoke to relied on plantation-forests as a source of income, and thus have less to lose by having their land reclaimed. The current cost of removing eucalyptus to replant it with something else prohibits most from doing so, but most owners still want to keep hold of what are usually ancestral forest lands.
“The belief is gone”
And it’s not just land that is being abandoned; as Fabio lamented, “the belief is gone,” too. For nearly a century, that belief – in the Progress plantations stood for (von Hellermann, 2016) – guided the widescale establishment of plantations of cash-crop species. The belief in what eucalyptus symbolised for local people has gone – the dreams of Progress and prosperity gone with them. Yet though the symbolism may be gone, the flammable, proliferous materiality of eucalyptus plantations remains, left as a constant remind of the failures and fatal consequences of the regime’s cultivation project.
[1] They had previously been pulping Maritime pine on a much smaller scale, but the innovation allowed them to scale production up, and produce krakt pulp, giving the sector a place on the international market.
[2] World Bank-funded afforestation with both pine and eucalyptus, mostly on land owned by the pulp companies, continued until well into the 1980s (A. M. C. Mendes, 2007), while EU funded projects continued until relatively recently (Veiras and Soto, 2011)
[3] Similarly, after the 2017 fires a new state agency, AGIF, was formed, helmed by a man who had formerly been a technician for The Navigator Company.
[4] Pulp industry figures think this kind of intensity is key to efficiently using the land, and so not using more than is needed, but more intensive production inevitably means the harm inflicted on the surrounding environment is necessarily more intense (Freer-Smith et al., 2019); after all, “everyone knows that segregating environmental spaces to cordon off danger does not work; “contamination slips through every barrier” (Tsing, 2012). And besides, given eucalyptus covers 9% of the country’s land area, there is little evidence for the kinds of restrain implied in such an argument.
[5] This no doubt added to the general excitement that surrounded this new, fast-growing cash-crop, as it spread into abandoned farmland and pine plantations.
[6] The pulp industry’s current expansion into Lusophone Africa complicates the picture
[7] There are growing fears of a similar situation happening with Portuguese eucalyptus plantations (Diogo et al., 2023; M. Silva, Machado, & Phillips, 2009)
[8] Even by 2005, an estimated 47% of eucalyptus in Portugal were in mixed or irregular stands resulting from ferality (Fernandes et al., 2019). Today the figure is likely much higher.
The Tree with a Thousand Faces 