The role that tree plantations play in filling the supply gap for industrial wood products and the contribution that industrial timber plantations and associated forest-based manufacturing and export sector play in creating jobs are common arguments to support the expansion of tree plantations (Negede, Pirard, and Kassa 2015). Besides their traditional productive function, tree plantations are also being promoted for mitigating climate change and for producing agro-fuels (Szulecka, Pretzsch, and Seccob 2014). Under the influence of the neo-liberal paradigm, the search for multi-purpose plantation forestry has often preferred large scale corporate owned forest plantations. This has sometimes rested upon the assumption that smallholders generally lack the capacity to achieve better productivity, which leads to believe that the most efficient way to achieve desired production are large-scale agribusiness ventures (Bissonnette and De Koninck 2015).