Barcoding trees for all the wrong reasons

Reuters reports that a British Company is barcoding trees across the word to prevent illegal logging.

Helveta is a privately owned company specializing in supply chain management in the timber and agriculture markets.  The company has hammered plastic barcodes into over a million trees in Africa, Asia and South America.  Though these barcodes do not make it impossible for illegal loggers to continue, they will make processing and exporting the wood a challenge.  According to Reuters:

“We bring transparency and visibility where historically that has probably been limited at best,” Patrick Newton, Helveta’s chief executive officer, told Reuters.

The company, which has just secured another 3 million pounds ($4.88 million) in funding from investors, has put barcodes on trees across the world, including in Bolivia, Ghana, Indonesia, Liberia, Malaysia and Peru.

Technological innovation? Certainly. Environmental protection? I’m still not sold. The corporation is barcoding trees in plantations, not forests. The practice seems more in favor of protecting business owners bottom lines than biodiversity.  At the crux of it is a cap and trade philosophy, where carbon offsets are used as an incentive for developing economies to increase their forest cover to soak up the fruits of our hyper-consumption lifestyles.

During my youth I worked in the forest sector as a tree planter. Tree plantations are not forests. They are industrialized monocultures, designed to turn a profit, not complex living ecosystems. While I’m all for increasing tree cover and technological innovation, this project looks more like a brilliant business idea than a environmental breakthrough.