英语翻译

英语翻译
Trouble at mill
Investors and the environment
ACROSS
the Far East,Latin America and Central Europe,new pulp mills are springing up
and existing mills are being extended.But these projects may carry a much
bigger financial risk than investors have realised.Many schemes have
exaggerated how much timber they can fell and crack downs on illegal logging
threaten to make their new mills unprofitable.
Pulp
mills are expensive.Building even a modest one from scratch can cost more than
$1 billion.Small pulp mills tend to be financed by banks in their home
markets.But the biggest projects,designed to produce more than 200,000 tonnes
of pulp a year,generally seek funds from overseas.Over the past decade
investment banks have invested some $40 billion in pulp mills,as demand for
paper has soared.Some industry analysts foresee over $50 billion in new
investment by 2015,much of it in Brazil,China and Indonesia.
The
Centre for International Forestry Research,which is based in Indonesia,has
just issued a new report on logging,which was paid for by the European
Commission and Britain's Department for International Development.It examined
67 projects proposed between 1995 and 2003—just under half of them in Asia.The
report argues that at least 20% of the projects had no proper environmental
assessments.It is hardly surprising that a green lobby group should decry the
practices of the logging industry.But what is new is that the report's author,
Machteld Spek,a financial analyst,argues convincingly that a disregard for
the sustainability of wood supplies and changing attitudes to logging,has
exposed investors to considerable financial risk.
In
Indonesia two pulp-mill companies,Asia Pulp & Paper and Asia Pacific
Resources International,borrowed more than $15 billion in the 1990s from
international capital markets,after convincing investors that they had sustainable
supplies of cheap fibre for pulp.But both companies are still years away from
planting enough trees to operate sustainably; and a recent crackdown on illegal
logging in Indonesia promises to make their business even more difficult.
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