In April 2025, Mongabay’s video team published an investigative film about price of Europe’s paper packaging boom, which is having an outsized effect in far away Mozambique.

The rise in e-commerce has created a booming demand for single-use paper packaging. Fast-growing, high-yield eucalyptus trees have become a popular choice for paper, but farming communities in Mozambique are paying a high price for this, according to the documentary produced by Boaventura Monjane, Davide Mancini and Juan Maza.

While Portugal used to be Europe’s main source of cellulose for paper made from eucalyptus, local communities there became concerned about the Australian tree’s effect on the environment, and its fire risk: compared with native oak trees, in eucalyptus plantations, “the fire spreads very rapidly due to the mass of flammable material,” forest engineer Domingo Patacho told Mongabay.

Central Portugal still grows a lot of eucalyptus, but in the 1980s, following protests in the north of the country, several paper companies began looking for alternative locations.

Then, when the European Commission proposed legislation to reduce single-use packaging waste, the pulp and paper industry lobbied “massively,” Sergio Baffoni, Environmental Paper Network’s campaign coordinator, told Mongabay. The result was that instead of reducing single-use packaging, there’s been “a shift of the materials from plastic to paper, presenting paper as green, renewable and perfect for the environment,” he said.

The pulp and paper company Portucel is 80% owned by the Portuguese company Navigator and 20% owned by the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank. In 2011, the Mozambican government gave Portucel the rights to use land and develop eucalyptus plantations. However, the land overlapped with rural communities that had to give up their farmland to the paper company, the documentary found. In return, the company promised locals employment and the construction of a school, hospital, water sources and access roads.

“But they didn’t build any of these things,” farmer Mugabe Augusto told Mongabay. Furthermore, the promised employment has only lasted for one month per year, not nearly enough to support a family.

The most lasting effect of the plantations may be chemical contamination of local water sources. Used to control weeds and termites among the trees, these herbicides and pesticides will linger in groundwater resources that the local community relies on, long after they are applied.