The Forest of the Future movement today accused the Government of financing eucalyptus plantations while the land is left abandoned and Europe is burning, and those who plant native species face difficulties.
“The State continues to actively increase the risk of forest fires by subsidizing the invasive and extremely combustible species that is eucalyptus, while Europe burns and Portugal is only a few degrees of longitude away from the same happening,” the movement said in a statement released today.
In the document the movement noted that the Environmental Fund had begun to “finance illegal eucalyptus plantations” through changes to the rules of the Floresta Ativa program, announced by the Secretary of State for Forests, Rui Ladeira.
Last month the official announced that the Floresta Ativa program, which supports cleaning and management of forest lands, would be relaunched “in the coming days,” with a budget of four million euros.
Among other information, Rui Ladeira advanced that the program will now allow “that all species, including also the eucalyptus row, can submit the application, with differentiated values,” since interventions are also “differentiated.”
By “flexibilizing” public funding to all species, eucalyptus plantations could begin to receive direct supports of up to 800 euros per hectare, “while those who planted native species face difficulty in recovering money invested in fuel management,” the civic movement, created in 2022, claims, and which challenges the current management of forest spaces.
In the statement it is lamented that the Government has “pulled open the purse strings” to finance the cleaning of eucalyptus plantations, many of them illegal, and directly subsidize monocultures of fast growth that feed the profits of the pulp-and-paper industry.
“The territory is abandoned, and money is spent to maintain and expand the species and the type of plantations that make Portugal the country that burns the most in Europe. There are eucalyptus plantations in total illegality across the country, violating mandatory minimum distances by law, near homes, along roads and destroying waterways. It is the same State that subsidizes fossil industries and emitters that increase the heat we endure and promote climate chaos,” said, cited in the statement, João Camargo, of the Future Forest Response Network.
The movement adds that the new access rules to Floresta Ativa “are financing the expansion of forest fires” at a time when the Mediterranean is burning and only by chance Portugal is not completely under devastating flames like Spain, France, Tunisia or Algeria.
