Large forestry businesses face serious conflicts with Indigenous peoples and local communities
My findings suggested serious long-standing conflicts between large forest enterprises and Indigenous communities as well as with some local non-Indigenous communities, leading to a non-sustainable situation for these firms in the long-term, as explained below.
Large plantation forestry businesses face long-standing land tenure conflicts with Mapuche peoples: Large forest enterprises and, particularly, large forest corporations have faced, and continue to face, severe land tenure conflicts with Mapuche peoples (an Indigenous ethnic group concentrated in the VIII and IX regions98). A number of aspects help to understand this long-standing and complex conflict faced by large plantation forest owners.
The first of these is related to the poverty in the regions where most large plantation forests are concentrated: while one respondent from the industry recognised the poverty in such regions, he did not blame the forest industry for this:
“Our company is present in 104 communes [Chilean administrative districts]. Within those communes the 80% of the people show the lowest human development index (HDI) of Chilean communes. It is always said that ‘forestry businesses have caused poverty in the neighbourhood’, but things don’t work that way, poverty already existed; we are placed on the 80% of the most eroded soils in the country and our neighbours, those who do not cultivate plantation forests, they carry on with their subsistence agriculture. ” (interview with PFB-MB-q01).
Consistently, the last official survey (Ministerio-Desarrollo-Social, 2014) of poverty in Chile showed a significant reduction in this problem compared with 2011, with 3.9% of the population categorized as extremely poor. Despite this positive change, the regions where both
98 According to the last reliable census of Indigenous population, Indigenous peoples are mostly concentrated in the
large plantation forests and the Mapuche peoples are concentrated, that is the VIII and IX regions, show the highest percentages of extreme poverty: 7.1 and 9.0%, respectively.
Second, as seen earlier in the Chapter, privatization policies applied during the late 1970s exacerbated a pre-existing conflict between the Mapuche peoples and the Chilean state, since many of them were forced to sell their lands (called “Merced titles”99) (see Figure 3.4) (CONADI, 2014; Miller Klubock, 2004) to non-Indigenous owners in a questionable fashion, originating a conflict that continues to today.
However, it is also the case that large plantation forestry businesses have sold lands that overlapped with former Merced titles to the state, so they can be returned to Indigenous peoples.100
Figure 3.4 XIX century map of a Chilean colony (Traiguén) including some Merced titles. Source: courtesy of the National Archive.
These new policies have made forest companies stop buying (or even considering buying) lands that may present some degree of overlap with such Merced titles101. But even not buying or retaining lands that overlap Merced titles was not a guarantee for a company of being free of conflicts, as this forest authority pointed out:
99 “Merced titles” is the Chilean name for Indigenous reservations.
100Those lands are returned to Indigenous communities under the 1993 Indigenous Law (Law No 19253). See
Appendix 13.
“…but this [the land tenure conflict] is complicated in this region too, because Indigenous communities are always claiming more lands that the Merced titles”. (interview with A-IX-01).
Some specialized industry officers provided an explanation for this fact, taking into account that the original territory of Mapuche peoples spanned around 10 million hectares and that they had a nomadic life style:
“So the final result was that the Mapuche peoples were forced to live on few hectares, each family had around 20 hectares. Luckily today each family has half an hectare because land was divided for successive generations. They overexploited their native forests, not leaving anything to survive…then, and this is pretty obvious; if they no longer had forests they sought trees from plantation forests and that’s the reason why trees are stolen from our lands. But they have nothing, and so the solution is not easy.” (interview with PFB- MB-q01).
According to the above interviewee and official statistics (CONADI, 2014; Comisionado-Presidencial-Asuntos-Indígenas, 2008), the Chilean state recognised 2,918 Merced titles totalling c. 510,387 hectares, and they would be inhabited by approximately 800,000 people. Other reasons why finding solutions to this conflict is hard are the fragmentation of Mapuche communities and the multi-centric governance of Indigenous communities102.
Third, the Mapuche conflict has turned violent since the late 1990s. This violence has been translated into attacks on forest trucks; threats and assaults to the staff of forest companies, including shootings perpetrated by violent activists, and intentional bushfires103. The vast majority of Mapuche peoples, however, are against violence, and the violent faction represents only a small proportion of this ethnic group, as claimed by this forest officer:
“My compromise is towards the communities, I consult them, I work along with them but I don’t want to be forced to work with that 1 to 2 % of violent peoples” (interview with PFB-MB-q01).
102 Very often, forest companies have had to negotiate, separately, with the lonko (male leaders), machi (usually,
female leaders) and the formal president of such communities since they often have radically different viewpoints. Also, in many occasions, firms have also had to negotiate with each member of those communities as they could not agree on the decisions of their leaders. This has been highly time and resources consuming. Interview with PFB- MB-q01.
103 Intentional forest wildfires had been particularly frequent in the last summers and they only seem to increase in
magnitude and severity. Usually, the wildfires connected with this conflict are much more devastating than those that are not connected. Interview with PFB-MB-q01. The media have also reported profusely intentional wildfires (Sustentare, 2014). In addition, according to official reports, one the main causes of wildfires are caused by the intentional action of people (27%), being plantation forests (28%) more affected than any other forest type (Lara et al., 2013).
Generally, an important part of the Mapuche conflict with large forests corporations has historical origins that have not been properly addressed by the state through effective public policies.
Large forest enterprises neglected Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities for a long time: Some respondents, even within the forest industry itself, felt that large forestry businesses had largely ignored their surrounding local communities, understanding that this would subsequently bring about a number of conflicts – including land tenure conflicts with Indigenous communities. As expressed by this forest officer:
“Fifteen years ago we started to mechanize our operations, not because of costs, actually it was expensive. The reason was because we wanted to improve our OHS indicators and they improved a lot when we mechanized. But this meant, and we didn’t realize it [until recently], that we caused more trouble on our operations: such unhappy people [who lost their jobs] started some wildfires on our plantations and cut native trees in areas in which we had native forests in retaliation104. Also, many people that had traditionally
entered into our forestlands to get some firewood [free leftovers from forest operations] found that we had restricted such permits because we despised of them. This event triggered a vicious circle: we made more people angry closing out doors to avoid wildfires, but instead it was self-defeating because more wildfires happened.” (interview with PFB-MB-q01).
The above interview also uncovered other motivations behind the deep resentment that many local communities and Indigenous representatives105felt against large forest enterprises: forestry workers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, from local communities that had participated in planting those trees suddenly were unemployed, and further, they had to stand the transit of heavy machinery on their roads, lifting dust, making noise, as well as causing a general deterioration in the quality of their everyday lives. Plantations used to be called “green soldiers” since in the view of Indigenous and local communities they have been “destructive, stand in straight lines and advance steadily forward” (Petermann and Langelle, 2006).
Similarly, one Indigenous villager106 illustrated the loss of jobs provided by large forest firms stating that “the forestry company no longer needs people [from that local community] because they now have machinery”.
104 In the Chilean culture, it is not unusual to find cases in which employees who feel they have been unfairly
dismissed plot against their former employers. Such actions can include thefts, defamation, and, in the case of forestry businesses, arsons and intentional wildfires.
105 Interviews with I-VIII-01 and I-IX-01. 106 Interview with I-VIII-01.
In brief, the restrictive approach followed by large forest companies and the lack of appropriate public policies generated a number of tensions with Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, with resistance ranging from simple thefts of firewood or illegal trespassing of forestlands to serious intentional wildfires, arsons and attacks.