Land and paper: the European pulp industry in Mozambique

While Gabriel Feijao pours honey into a plastic bottle with the help of his daughter, his wife prepares freshly baked loaves of bread from a traditional charcoal-fired oven. Another of Gabriel’s children produces the charcoal a few hundred metres away, using tree trunks collected from his land.

Coal, honey, bread and vegetables are what the family produces for themselves but also, to a large extent, to sell at the local market. This subsistence farming is widespread in an unspoilt rural area in central Mozambique, in the district of Sussundenga, Manica province.

The vast expanse of savannah and shrubland is only interrupted by granite mountains and patches of forest which, when seen up close, form intricate geometric patterns: these are in fact eucalyptus plantations.

“They told us they wanted to produce paper, create a factory and many other things. But the factory is in Portugal. So it benefits people there, not here. We want food so we can eat. If they take away our land, where are we going to produce our food?”

Gabriel Feijao is not the only angry inhabitant of the rural community of Cortina-de-Ferro, a two-day drive from the capital, Maputo. 15 years ago, a Portuguese company obtained the right to use the land here to plant eucalyptus, a tree used exclusively for the industrial production of cellulose, from which paper and cardboard is made.

For the time being, however, no cellulose is produced in Mozambique. Instead, the logs are sent to the port of Beira, and from there they are shipped to Aveiro, Portugal, where they are transformed into the raw material needed to produce boxes, high-quality paper, and packaging of all kinds, from take-away cups to the packaging for electronics produced and consumed in Europe.

The Portuguese Navigator Company is the majority shareholder of Portucel Mozambique, while the remaining 20% belongs to the IFC (the International Finance Corporation, the financial arm of the World Bank).

Portucel Mozambique has obtained land use rights (DUAT) for a duration of 50 years for 356,000 hectares of agricultural land in the interior of the former Portuguese colony. The Navigator Company is Portugal’s third largest exporter, with an annual turnover of almost two billion euro, and contributes about 1% of the country’s GDP. As land in Mozambique is predominantly state-owned, the company had to negotiate the use of land with the Mozambique government in 2011. Instead of pure and simple expropriation, which would have forced thousands of families to relocate, what was eventually agreed upon was a voluntary cession of land use by the residents, with a contract signed between the families and the company.

However, many people interviewed accuse the company and the government of not fulfilling the promises included in the contract, and complain of an overall lack of transparency. Now they find themselves without land and without the expected economic returns.

While Gabriel Feijao has refused to give up his land, he believes it is only a matter of time before they get their hands on his machamba, as mixed family farming land is called in Mozambique, in what is mostly a traditional agroforestry system.

Of the 236,000 hectares allocated to the Portuguese company’s eucalyptus plantations in Mozambique, only 14,000 have been planted to date. According to the company, the investment is still in the pilot phase. This is the largest foreign investment in the African nation’s agricultural land since it gained independence, and is equivalent to about $2.5 billion, in a country whose GDP in 2023 was $20.6 billion.

Over a territory that is roughly nine times the size of Portugal, the “mosaic” model chosen by the company involves planting close to rural communities, which are often scattered and disconnected. The people mainly travel by foot, between patches of plantations, machambas and dwellings, which are mainly huts built with local materials.

“We have to walk kilometres to get to the well now, because the well we used before has dried up, while another one is no longer drinkable,” says Augusto Mugabe, in  a different community. He gave up his 1.7 hectares of machamba under a voluntary handover agreement, and now what used to be his land is covered with tall eucalyptus trees that he helped to plant.

Mugabe, like many other people, says that the company promised work for 50 years to those who ceded the use of their land. Instead, the maintenance of the plantations requires little labour, which has led to tensions over time between Portucel and the people who expected an improvement in their quality of life.

For Mugabe, the payment of 236 meticais per working day (around €3.40) does not compensate for the loss of land, from which he and his family could benefit when planting vegetables. For its part, Portucel declares that during the more than 10 years it has been in the region, it has created 250 permanent jobs, and several precarious or casual employment contracts equivalent to 1,500 full-time jobs.

Whatever progress there is, it is gradual, and only 2,000 hectares have been planted so far in the province of Manica, a small fraction of what is envisaged for the approved project. The company is committed to contracting labour mainly from people who have ceded land or are part of the community, should the need arise.

Natacha Bruna, a researcher in the College of Agriculture and Life Science at Cornell University, has conducted various studies on the impact of Portucel in the neighbouring province of Zambézia for OMR (Observatorio do Meio Rural, or Rural Environment Observatory). According to Bruna’s analysis, only 17 % of people interviewed obtained permanent employment, and most were only employed to prepare the land for eucalyptus cultivation, without the continued employment that residents had hoped for.

The result, according to Bruna, is a social disaster: “they came with the best of speeches and talked of best practices, but what we see is an increase in localised poverty where plantations have been established”. According to Bruna, a few local elites have benefited from the jobs obtained in exchange for land, i.e. those who had plenty of land to give away while also keeping a portion. Many smallholders, however, have simply been persuaded by the local leaders, or were only told about the arrival of the plantations.

Sergio Baffoni, campaign coordinator of the Environmental Paper Network, has been monitoring the Portucel Mozambique case as well as other operations related to the international pulp market. “The demand for paper is constantly increasing in Europe”, he says. “In the last 20 years, pulp consumption has increased by 22 percent, and the supply from European forests has increased by nine percent. The difference has been made up by imports, from countries such as Brazil, Uruguay and Chile”.

Mozambique is a new player in the global pulp market. Navigator Company says that Mozambique’s eucalyptus is destined for the Asian market, especially China, which has a high demand for pulp to produce paper and other derivatives, for domestic consumption and for exports to the so-called “Global North”. The construction of Portucel’s planned pulp mill in Mozambique is currently postponed until 2032, pending the expansion of the port of Macuse, from which the company estimates 1.5 million tonnes of pulp will be shipped annually.

From Australia to Portugal

In the meantime, eucalyptus, a plant native to Australia, has become the dominant species in the forests of Portugal, which is Europe’s leading producer of eucalyptus pulp. Beginning in the 1980s, following the independence of former colonies such as Angola and Mozambique, the strong public and private cellulose industry stimulated the forestation of eucalyptus within its territory, attracting many Portuguese smallholders to plant the species. At the time, it appeared to promise economic prosperity in exchange for minimal plantation maintenance. Since the 1980s, however, many of these areas, especially in the north-centre of the country, have been left unmaintained, due to depopulation of inland areas and low yields.

Over time, the species has taken up more and more space, and now occupies 845,000 hectares, 26% of Portugal’s national forest area. Following the tragedy of Petrogrão Grande, the fire that traumatised Portugal in 2017, killing 66 people and incinerating 53,000 hectares (half of which were eucalyptus), the Portuguese government decided to put a stop to the expansion of eucalyptus trees, and to seek more efficient ways to manage a species that, if left to its own devices, is a time bomb.

Augusto Mugabe shows us the well where he used to fetch water for his machamba. It is now surrounded by rows of eucalyptus trees more than 15 metres high. “Since they planted here, this well and others in the area have dried up, because the eucalyptus absorbs so much water from the soil.” Mugabe, along with his neighbours, says that soon after planting the eucalyptus, with the arrival of the rainy season, several people in the area experienced stomach problems. They believe it is due to the chemicals used in the plantations.

The company uses an insecticide, thiamethoxam, which is applied to the roots of the plant during the first year and a half of its life to prevent certain insects from impairing its growth. The open-air use of this chemical has been banned throughout the EU since 2018, and it is considered “moderately dangerous to humans” by the FAO. In Europe, the ban is mainly due to its effects on pollinating insects such as bees, which are crucial for biodiversity.

In an email exchange, Portucel claims that in ten years of operation in the country it has not recorded a single well drying up, nor does it believe that eucalyptus monocultures have an impact on the availability of groundwater. Regarding the use of pesticides, the company replies that water from rivers and streams near the plantations is analysed twice a year for pesticides, and so far nothing has been found. The company also states that the use of chemicals such as thiamethoxam is in compliance with Mozambican law, and in line with the recommendations of the IFC and international certification schemes. According to Portucel, this rules out the plantations having any impact on water quality.

“Each eucalyptus tree consumes between 30 and 60 litres of water per day,” says Sergio Baffoni, drawing on several international studies. “Now multiply that by millions of trees. And all this to fill Europe with rubbish.” In Europe, packaging represents 50 percent of paper and 40 percent of plastic, and accounts for one third of the waste produced at municipal level.

“We think that consuming less means having a difficult and sad life. But is it sadder to eat from a disposable paper plate or from a reusable ceramic plate?” Baffoni is referring to the substitution of disposable materials derived from the use of fossil fuels by those derived from cellulose, which is indirectly driven by the European Packaging Directive. This directive was heavily influenced by industry lobbyists to prevent reusable packaging from taking the place of disposable packaging. This is a transition that will inevitably involve importing raw materials from other continents to meet consumer demand.

🤝 This article was supported by Journalismfund Europe and published within the Come Together collaborative project