Suzano has announced the operational start-up of its new huge eucalyptus pulp mill in Ribas do Rio Pardo in the federal state of Mato Grosso do Sul. The pulp mill, with a production capacity of 2.55 million tons per year, is presented by Suzano as the world’s largest pulp line, and it is the second pulp mill the company has in the area, alongside the Horizonte mill in Três Lagoas.
The mill is located in the extremely biodiverse and very important Cerrado biome. Within a small area (just five municipalities) three huge mills have been already built, two of them by Suzano (Cerrado and Horizonte). One existing mill is now expanding to a second production line, while two more brand new mills are planned in the same area.
Suzano presents its pulping expansion as a chance for sustainable development, climate and forest protection. In reality, Suzano’s claims are confronted with concrete cases of land grabbing, violent conflicts with leaders of indigenous communities, as well as the negative impacts on water resources from eucalyptus plantations, the chemical poisoning of subsistence agriculture due to the use of pesticides putting in question whether this company should be eligible for green finance. These impacts are documented in a recent document published by EPN, (also available in Portuguese, with summaries in Dutch and Chinese).
The Cerrado biome is the theater of unstoppable deforestation, whereby ranchers often sell their land to the pulp and paper industry and use the profits to purchase new land at a forest frontier. While deforestation has increased, according to a study that compared land use change over the past 20 years, Brazil’s total land under pasture has barely changed during that time. Cattle ranchers may be an instrument of deforestation, but it is often the pulp and paper industry which is the engine.
What is even worse, is that most of this expansion is just aimed to feed the hungry packaging industry, to produce single-use applications only destined to increase the waste crisis. Most of the products will be thrown away within the same hour of using it.
The mill will also sell a surplus of 180 MW of energy from burning biomass, a controversial technology that emits more CO2 per unit of energy than coal.
Suzano invested approximately USD 3.1 billion in the construction of the pulp mill, partially covered by public (meaning taxpayers) money. USD 725 million loan by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), an arm of the World Bank, and further USD 420 million have been provided by the Brazilian public development bank, BNDS. Back in 2022, 40 NGOs had written to the IFC demanding not to finance that project exactly because of the outlined impacts. At that time, EPN had also published in-depth research revealing the impacts of the ongoing and massive expansion of the pulp & paper industry in the area where the mill is planned. For the Cerrado project, Suzano is investing further USD1.2bn in the expansion of industrial plantations, alongside and for pulp outbond logistics.
EPN International has laid out a comprehensive set of demands to respect the traditional land rights of Indigenous and other local communities, mitigate environmental impacts on forests, climate and water table, and embrace transparency.
We are calling on all public and private financial institutions to investigate these demands. They should suspend financial services to the company in the meantime, and if Suzano does not show sufficient improvement – divest completely.