Previous PageTable Of ContentsNext Page


The
uncompromising
future

A.J. Leslie

Alf Leslie is Senior Fellow in the School
of Forestry, University of Melbourne, Australia.
He was Director of the FAO Forestry Industries
Division from 1977 to 1981.

Nobody doubts that the future is going to be different from the past; it always has been. But today the inevitability of change is particularly obvious. Those infamous twins, globalization and information technology, will alone make the future very different from even the recent past, and particularly from the last 20 years or so, during which time most current thinking on forestry has emerged.

However, regardless of what the twins will bring in the way of formidable challenges or glowing opportunities for forestry, two other time bombs of equal if not greater significance to forestry are already primed to go off in the future. Their impact will make the past almost useless as a guide to the future. The first and most certain of these bombs is the arrival - and for some regions the imminent arrival - of a massive surge in the supply of plantation-grown industrial roundwood. The second, less certain bomb, is global warming.

The plantation effect will very soon start to push the world's industrial wood supply and demand balance towards, if not into, surplus. This is the very reverse of the anticipated deficits (implied more often than stated) that have underlain forest policies almost everywhere, and it is a near certainty: even the somewhat restrained analyses of FAO show large leaps in industrial roundwood availability by 2010 at the latest. This turnaround to oversupplied wood markets will bring low and perhaps falling price ceilings and cut-throat competition, which will be particularly intense among wood products, while the costs of most of the inputs used in the forest products industries will continue to rise. There are no signs that the thought of the plantation effect bringing this sort of future is of concern to more than a few in the forest sector. Yet that future is not much more than ten or 15 years away.

Global warming is less certain, despite what current conventional wisdom seems to promulgate, although the chances that it is on the way seem to be high enough for it to be factored into current forest policy. The time scale is not nearly as immediate as that of the plantation effect, so many existing production forests and plantations, if their rotations are not too long, will scramble through. Recently established and newly regenerated forests, slower-growing existing forests or new plantations may not be so lucky. Most of these seem to be doomed to finish up as the wrong species in the wrong place, if the global climate belts shift as they are expected to do with global warming.

In effect, the scenario arising from this combination of forces is telling us that much of what we now do, advocate, study and teach in forestry is hopelessly wrong. However, the picture is not all doom and gloom, as it might appear to be. Quite the contrary; it is actually a heaven-sent opportunity. For some time now the world has been signalling that forests are more valuable as forests than they are as wood factories. Forestry's response to this has been, at best, rather half-hearted, but there is still a chance to redress this. Above all, however, knowing that we are going to be thrown out of what we have taken to be our core business gives us the opportunity to design a really new forestry. And that will be a forestry in which industrial wood is a by-product of ecosystem conservation while the ecosystems themselves are adjusting to changing physical environments.

To give a lead in that direction is a much greater and more urgent challenge for international organizations than is the usual preoccupation with a nearly defunct present.


Previous PageTop Of PageNext Page