Via the Forest Cover publication from the Global Forest Coalition, Exploited Lands, Exploited Lives: Struggles for Forests, Life, and Gender Justice in the Global South
By Heather Lee, Global Justice Ecology Project and Campaign to STOP GE Trees (Canada)
Monoculture tree plantations for carbon offsets are taking over swathes of native forests, destroying ecosystems, displacing communities, and violating human rights, particularly those of Afro-descendant women. This article about Brazil exposes how big tech giants are driving the expansion of these plantations, and calls for such false solutions to the climate crisis to be opposed at COP30 in Belém.
As artificial intelligence (AI), data centers, and digital infrastructures demand massively increasing amounts of energy, big tech giants and corporations are turning to carbon offset markets to maintain a façade of climate responsibility. This includes companies like Microsoft and Apple offsetting their greenhouse gas emissions through purchasing carbon credits from eucalyptus plantations in Brazil.
These industrial tree plantations are expanding rapidly at the hands of corporations like Suzano, the world’s largest pulp and paper producer. Presented as climate solutions, tree plantations commodify nature while also destroying ecosystems, displacing communities, and giving rise to human rights violations.
Meanwhile, calculations of the carbon stored in plantations are questionable. They fail to account for the vast amounts of carbon released from clear-cutting native forests, which are far more carbon-rich and biodiverse, to make room for the plantations. The result is trees planted in perfect rows and columns, optimal for mechanical harvesting and herbicide spraying, with a complete lack of biodiversity—yet the companies purchasing the credits are able to falsely promote themselves as “green” and “carbon neutral.”
Tree plantations are ultimately false solutions to climate change, as they do nothing to stop forest loss, and can even cause natural forests to be razed. They also reinforce a patriarchal and corporate-dominated economic system that oppresses women in all their diversity, Indigenous Peoples, and rural communities.
Young sisters in a Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) encampment in Galdino dos Santos in Espirito Santo. Orin Langelle/GJEP
The Gendered and Colonial Impacts of Industrial Tree Plantations
The phenomenon of monoculture tree plantations may be relatively new, but it is a legacy of colonial land grabs rooted in the patriarchal control of resources, and they continue to drive dispossession. In Brazil, the issue is highly political, with the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST, in Portuguese) reclaiming plantation land for settlements of landless peasants. But the massive plantations of companies like Suzano continue to threaten the livelihoods, cultural practices, and health of Quilombola and other forest-dependent communities, including Indigenous Peoples who rely on intact forests and agroecological practices for food sovereignty, cultural identity, and survival.
In 2023, the Campaign to STOP GE Trees, coordinated by the Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP), led a delegation to Brazil to collaborate with communities and gather testimonies about the effects of eucalyptus plantations on water, health, food systems, and cultural survival.
Celio Leocadio, a leader of a Quilombo community of Volta Miúda, Caravelas, Bahia, stated that the planting of eucalyptus in Espírito Santo and Bahia had grave environmental and socioeconomic impacts. “They removed the native plant cover and all the nutrients from the soil. People here used to do agroforestry, use cover crops, and let the land rest—but now, with eucalyptus, there is no rest for the soil,” he said. “This model of plantations without any kind of environmental requirements by our national and global governments makes it extremely difficult for us as a society, especially for our forest-dependent and Indigenous Peoples.”
Several communities from the Landless Workers Movement we met with were also undertaking important agroecological work, such as training people in the region to grow food organically. The agroecological and agroforestry work of Quilombola communities is significantly impacted by water shortages, the destruction of medicinal plant ecosystems critical to traditional knowledge systems, and the undermining of local food sources. Communities are also exposed to agrochemicals from tree plantations, including glyphosate, which has been linked to various health issues, including increased cancer risk. Women, as caretakers of water, health, and family sustenance, suffer the brunt of these impacts.
Women in the Quilombola town of Angelin II, a matriarchal community surrounded by eucalyptus and sugarcane plantations, testified to us about the impacts of Suzano’s agrochemicals on their environment. They said that they could no longer sell their produce as organic, and many of their livestock were sickened or died due to herbicides sprayed by drones. They also stated that Suzano used surveillance drones to monitor their activities, invading their privacy and homes.
A harvesting machine operating in a eucalyptus plantation. Anne Petermann/GJEP
The New, Irreversible Threats from GM Trees
Brazil’s rural communities now face an even greater threat: genetically engineered (also called genetically modified or GM) eucalyptus trees. In a historic and devastating decision, Brazil became the first country in the world to approve GM trees for commercial planting after it granted Suzano approval to commercially plant GM eucalyptus trees. They are engineered to resist toxic herbicides like glyphosate, kill insects (including pollinators), and grow rapidly. Alarmingly, some of the GM trees combine all three of these traits.
Moisés Savian of Brazil’s Ministry of Agrarian Development has identified corporate interests as the driving force behind the push for GM eucalyptus, saying: “It makes no sense in my view to have a transgenic [eucalyptus] associated with glyphosate. It is much more linked to market interests of the corporations that want to sell herbicides.”
These GM trees will increase agrochemical use, threaten biodiversity, and harm fragile water systems. The problem is only growing; Suzano plans to expand its plantations in the Amazon and the Cerrado, two of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth and critical carbon sinks. The pulp and paper producer has named the Amazon region one of the “weedy” regions needing their GM herbicide-resistant trees, which raises serious ecological and social concerns.
During a GJEP press conference at CBD COP 16, Elvis Huni Kui of the Federation of the Huni Kai People of the state of Acre, Brazil, said GM trees “could absolutely destroy the balance of the ecosystem of the Amazon… this is the knife to the throat of our rainforests…the very survival of the Amazon is at stake.”
Suzano is also building the world’s largest pulp and paper mill in a small town in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul. The project threatens grave damage to natural habitats, biodiversity, water, and air, and a devastatingly precipitous population influx. The 10,000 workers, most of whom reside in nearby male-dominated worker camps, also increase the threat of violence towards the local population, especially women.
Regional and Global Repercussions
The approval of GM trees in Brazil endangers the country’s forests and people, but also paves the way for widespread commercialization and large-scale release of GM trees across Latin America. Large-scale eucalyptus plantations are already established in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. GM traits from Brazil could spread to naturalized eucalyptus species throughout the region, threatening cross-border biodiversity and the territorial integrity of Indigenous and local communities.As Gustavo Ulcué Campo of Colombia’s Nasa community and the National Commission of Indigenous Territories (CNTI) explained: “GMO trees threaten Indigenous Peoples’ way of life, ancestral knowledge, and food systems. Defending territories means defending life!”
Violating Rights and Ignoring Indigenous Knowledge
Genetically engineering trees is a dangerous, untested, and irreversible technology. GM trees represent a continuation of colonial thinking—imposing corporate, techno-fixes over Indigenous knowledge and ecological balance. There are also fundamental challenges regarding risk assessments for GM trees due to how risks are framed within different ecological viewpoints.
Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network sees GM trees as a violation of how we view all life forms and the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples: “This is part of a colonial mentality of a predatory knowledge of property of life. When we talk about our rights, we talk about the forests as well.”
Genetic engineering can also result in unintended and unpredictable changes in trees’ DNA, traits, and behaviour, which may not be noticed in initial tests and could cause serious long-term harm. Geneticist Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher, an independent scientist with EcoNexus and the Federation of German Scientists, warned in 2023 that “the risks of GM trees are extremely high in terms of the impact on biodiversity, the people living around it, and the global ecosystem and climate.”
GM trees could also be included in false solutions like REDD+ and carbon offset markets, further threatening communities by increasing interest in this risky technology. The company Living Carbon is creating trees that resist decay to “store carbon,” potentially forever, while others manipulate lignin (the tough, woody material that makes trees rigid and slows their decay) for biofuel use, altering the very core of what trees are and transforming their relation to the ecosystem.
“Who has the foolishness [and] ugliness to take the seed from this relative and alter it in whatever manner they do and whatever way those laboratories allow them?” asked Ponca Nation Ambassador on the Environment Casey Camp-Horinek, speaking in 2024. “It hurts how these humans are coming up with these false solutions to what they have created—what they call climate change.”
Brazil Must Be Held Accountable – The Time to Act is Now
Brazil’s approval of GM trees violates the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s 2008 de facto moratorium on GM trees. No independent, long-term studies exist that prove the safety of GM trees, and geneticists point out that such studies are likely impossible. As Brazil prepares to host COP30 in November 2025, we must not let GM trees become an acceptable climate “solution.”Climate justice must center the rights and demands of women in all their diversity, Indigenous Peoples, and frontline communities. Climate solutions must reject corporate greenwashing and embrace agroecology, food sovereignty, traditional knowledge, and community-driven forest protection.
