Saving Portugal’s Cork Oak Forests through Dialogue
Engaging actors in the value chain of a global commodity can reveal opportunities for sustainable landscape management. As the conclusion of the following study on the Portuguese montado suggests, it is crucial for all forest users to come together and talk about the future of the ecosystem they all depend on.
The Cork Oak forests in the Iberian Peninsula are landscapes shaped by the traditional knowledge and practices of their inhabitants. They are unique ecosystems formed by the hands of generations of people as well as animals, both wildlife and livestock. Thus, they are rich in cultural and biological diversity which characterises and sustains them. However, the complex connections of our modern world are affecting the management of these forests. The income generated from the montado is no longer guaranteed and people are leaving the woodlands to their own fate. This results in the deterioration of centuries of biocultural heritage.
There is an asset linked to the Cork Oak forests which used to ensure a profitable income, even in times of crises. This is cork, the outer bark of the Cork Oak, Quercus suber L. Most wine drinkers will know the refined product when opening a bottle of wine, but cork is a multifaceted material which can be transformed into all sorts of things, such as isolation boards, fishing rod handles, and even tiny parts in musical instruments. Since the Age of European Renaissance, cork has been valued as a reliable water-resistant material with a global trade range. This is the case, as the Cork Oak has its natural distribution almost exclusively in the Western part of the Mediterranean Basin — with an exemption of a small population of trees in California, US.
In our latest study within the project Landscape Chains, we followed the value chain of natural cork bottle stoppers in order to gain an understanding of the way cork travels the world. We performed interviews with cork producers, meaning the land managers or owners of the Cork Oak forest, the intermediaries who prepare the cork for further industrial transformation, the transformers producing the bottle stoppers, and lastly the wine makers as consumers. We wanted to get an idea of how the material, a landscape product stemming from a unique biocultural landscape, moves along the the chain and how it is perceived by those who are in immediate contact with it — and who furthermore depend on this for their livelihood. If there is a stone in one person’s shoe, no wonder that it drags the whole party down. In other words, the intention of this study was to see:
Do the different nodes in the value chain actually know what the other nodes are doing or which challenges they are facing?
We summarised the networks, the flows, and the challenges to the current supply and demand of cork. As it turns out, a major challenge mentioned by all value-chain agents was the quality of the material. Because of a changing climate with increasing droughts, invasive insects and fungi are inhabiting the cork oaks and ruining the growth of the tree or even the precious bark itself. This results in many small pieces of cork that are unhandy for the processing and production of bottle stoppers, leaving only a small gain for the farmer and loads of trouble for the industry. Only a small part of the harvested cork is of a good enough quality to become all-natural bottle stoppers which are sold at a high premium reserved for high quality wines. This irregular material brings with it unequal terms for those producers who only have a few trees and thus a small harvest. Large land-owners and big cork processing companies, such as Amorim, have the competitive advantage, leaving small-holders behind and making the practice of cork stripping even less profitable and attractive.
Since the 1990s, natural cork bottle stoppers have received a bad reputation from the presence of trichloroanisols, also known as TCA or cork taint, making the wine taste off. This has led to the competition of materials such as plastic or biopolymer bottle stoppers, or even metal screw caps. However, it turns out that the development of “technical bottle stoppers” might have a large role to play in the sustainability of Cork Oak forests as well. Stoppers made from cork granulate and natural resins may offer a profitable motivation for harvesting and processing cork. At the moment, there is a wide range of stoppers made from the low-quality cork not suited for all-natural stoppers, and as a way for the cork industry to become less dependent on the wine business, these granulates are also used to create other products. The 100% natural material is winning in on the sustainability agenda in industry and design, contributing to better indoor climates, sound isolation, and even as furniture. The granulates can easily be moulded into any shape, only chasing the borders of the imagination of product designers.
All in all, what we learned from this approach — talking to representatives of each node of the cork value chain — is that it can reveal common areas of concern. This also indicates that possibilities for a shared vision for the business could be achieved.
What it takes is cooperation.
One of the biggest challenges for bringing people together could be that, as in any other business, each party is eventually competing against each other in the race of survival. However, if survival of the Cork Oak forests — and thus of the basis of the entire industry — is the aim, it will take collaboration to a certain degree. If there is nobody left with the skills to actually strip the cork from the trees, it will not be produced anymore. And then what good is a first-class production facility if there is no raw material?
For more details and other findings, please take a look at our publication, and to the website of the project Landscape Chains:
Sørensen IH, Torralba M, Quintas-Soriano C, Muñoz-Rojas J and Plieninger T (2021): Linking Cork to Cork Oak Landscapes: Mapping the Value Chain of Cork Production in Portugal. Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 5:787045. doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2021.787045
