Plantation Wood in World Trade : 10th World Forestry Congress

Paris

1991

S. 9-19

Serie

400076098

Forest plantations represent a very small proportion of the forest area of the world. They are nevertheless the most productive forests for wood production and are supplying an ever increasing poportion of required fuelwood and industrial woods. The rate of increase in the world consumption of wood products is expected to be small (1.9%) and gradual until year 2000 and beyond. Although export origins will change due primarily to environmental or economic considerations perceived by either the public of producer countries or the consumers, no shortage of raw material is expected. A relatively small number of countries including Chile, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and Portugal who are aggressively developing their plantations and the markets for their products will benefit from most of the increase in the trade of plantation wood products. These an other plantation countries such as Korea, the U.S.A., China and others will, due to their efforts in applied research, make great strides in the development of improved plantation financial yields and of substitution products that will replace wood from natural forests with plantation wood. Plantations require very large, low yield investments on extensive areas of land that, particularly in developing countries, are much needed for subsistence agriculture and other more pressing purposes. In order to be economically successful, plantation programmes at their inception have to be linked to a market or an industrial base. They require fast growing, high yield species that permit acceptable returns on the required investment in low risk circumstances. It is likely, under these conditions, that large scale plantation schemes will continue to take place mostly in temperate industrialized countries under the control of, or with the collaboration of the private sector, the only group genuinely concerned with economic feasibility and with motivation to conduct successful applied research and development programmes. Not only for geographical reasons but also because successful plantations are highly specialized and usually composed of one or very few species. They will never be a palliative for the disappearing natural tropical forests of the world. Their composition offer very little contribution to the conservation of bio-diversity and few opportunities for the simultaneous production of other forest products. The potential contribution of forest plantations to the solution of the world energy requirements as well as to climate control will be hampened by the lack of available, geographically well located land and the lack of available funds resulting from the low yield on investments associated to type of plantations. The greatest poportion of future plantations will continue to be for industrial purposes, in temperate industrialized countries as dictated by the state of the art regarding fast..