Financiers in the forests on Vancouver Island, British Columbia: On fixes and colonial enclosures

Abstract

Starting in the mid 2000s, a financial asset management company and institutional investors began to invest in timberlands in British Columbia, Canada's most western province. In a period of political economic crisis, investors looked to real assets—“dirt and trees” in the words of one research participant—as a means of accumulating capital through securing access to huge parcels of the most productive and valuable forestland in North America. This article analyses these investments as a socioecological fix for finance capital suggesting that investments in land represent a means for capital and the state to negotiate moments of crisis. The article complicates existing accounts of fixes by demonstrating how the survival of capital in a settler context is fully dependent on an ongoing settler‐colonial project of separating Indigenous people from their land base. The article focuses on the explicitly “private” nature of the land under examination and how this is central to the strategies of investors, the state's deregulation of forest policies, and the marginalization of First Nations' claims to land. The article demonstrates that in settler contexts, discussions of fixes need to be much more attentive to the historic and enduring colonial threads woven through investments in land.

Industrial restructuring, spatio-temporal fixes and the financialization of the North European forest industry

“…Following the burst of the IT-bubble, investors’ interest for fixed, real assets such as real estate and natural resources increased (Lewis, 2005), which put an upward pressure on nominal forest land prices in several economies (Ekers, 2019). Swedish institutional investors became major forest owners in 2004 when Korsnäs and Stora Enso, in order to improve their balance sheets, put their forest assets (valued 17,7 billion SEK) in the newly created a holding company Bergvik Skog AB, of which half was owned and traded by institutional investors.…”

“…A combination of less generous public support, stronger shareholder value norms, larger rates of financial value-extraction, but also a faster decline in paper demand, are seemingly important reasons for a faster forest industry decline in North America compared to Northern Europe. Compared to the US and Canadian forest industries (Ekers, 2019), the socioecological fix has not only benefited financial capital but also North European non-financial firms.…”

“…Similar fixes have previously emerged in other industries, including in the North American forest industry. Between 1983 and 2009, institutional investors bought 43 million acres of forests to a value of 39,7 billion dollars in the US (Gunnoe, 2014) and have become large forest owners in Canada since 2003 following judicial amendments (Ekers, 2019). Airlines, retailing, agriculture, tourist and food industries have likewise swapped fixed assets for cash with financial investors since the 1980s and increasingly since the financial crisis of 2008–09 as a way to improve balance sheets, liquidity and profitability (Yrigoy, 2016).…”

The coloniality of private forest lands: Harvesting levels, land grants, and neoliberalism on Vancouver Island

“…A challenge in this research is comparing the harvesting volumes we have generated through the HBS with company records. IT and TimberWest are privately held companies owned by three public sector pension plans (Ekers 2019). Neither company provides any information on the size of their harvest.…”

“…Historically, forestry companies were given TFLs, essentially incredibly inexpensive 25‐year leases to public land, in return for including their private holdings in the licence. In the language of policy makers in BC, historically private forest land was treated “as if it was Crown land” insofar as it was bundled together with “public” land in TFLs and regulated through different iterations of the Forest Act and the Forest Practices Code (see Ekers 2019). The PMFLA only became meaningful if landowners could remove their private land from their TFLs.…”