Angola
Brazil
Central African Republic
France
Germany, Federal Republic of
Iran
Italy
Japan
Portugal
Solomon Islands
Turkey
United Kingdom
· A recent mission to Angola, in connection with a world coffee study being undertaken by FAO, the World Bank and the International Coffee Organization, reports on the development of forest industries based mainly on plantations of quick-growing species. The plantation zone is mostly confined to the high-plateau area within altitudes of 1,000 to 2.000 meters on savanna of miyombo woodland type, well suited to the growth of eucalypts and conifers.
Out of a total extent of 103,000 hectares planted up to 1965, approximately 93,000 hectares are in eucalypt species, chiefly Eucalyptus saligna (50,000 hectares) and Eucalyptus camaldulensis (30,000 hectares), either state-owned, owned by private companies or by private individuals. In addition there is an appreciable amount of Cupressus lusitanica and Pinus patula. Growth of Eucalyptus saligna is between 15 and 25 cubic meters per hectare per year, pines between 10 and 17 cubic meters and cypress about 7 to 10 cubic meters.
The Benguela Railway Company, which owns about 37,000 hectares of plantations, uses the wood for fuel consuming about 570,000 tons annually on the major railway line which runs from Lobito on the Atlantic coast to Texeira de Sousa on the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a distance of 1,350 kilometers.
Since 1961, a major development has been a pulp and paper industry at Alto Catumbela, on the River Catumbela near the railway line on the high-plateau area, roughly midway between Benguela port and Nova Lisboa, the capital of Huambo province. The company uses as raw material mainly Eucalyptus saligna, supplemented at present by small quantities of sisal fiber from its own plantations. It now owns approximately 9,000 hectares of eucalypt plantations in four centers and is contemplating an annual rate of extension of about 2,500 hectares. The mill produces raw and bleached pulp, kraft and writing paper, and multiply sacks. The present daily production is about 70 to 75 tons of pulp and 15 tons of paper. Plans are in hand to increase production almost twofold.
· It is reported that Norway's largest industrial complex is building a pulp factory in southern Brazil, in the range of 165,000 tons annually, based mainly on eucalypts. This is a joint venture with the international financing enterprise ADELA. It is intended that the pulp shall be shipped in bulk to Norway for processing into paper and rayon fibers, releasing spruce for newsprint.
· The FAO forestry adviser in Brazil, Lucas A. Tortorelli, has sent some photographs which show some of the devastation caused by floods in Rio de Janeiro and the surrounding areas in January this year, ironically just after the Brazilian Government had successfully initiated important steps toward a reforestation program set in motion as the result of floods of a year earlier.
The devastation provides yet another example of the dangers of uncontrolled clearing of forest land to make way for agriculture and fruit growing. As Mr. Tortorelli explains, the tragedy should be reflected upon by the many other countries, not only in Latin America, where thoughtless destruction of the forest cover still proceeds at an increasing rate under the pressure of population growth. In fact, an FAO working party is holding a meeting in Romania in September on these very problems.
· A British expedition is exploring one of the last unknown land areas in the world, a remote part of the Brazilian interior where the Amazon watershed meets the dry savanna land of the south. Two previous British expeditions disappeared near Suia, where the base camp will be.
The initial party included a lecturer at the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Edinburgh University, whose speciality is forest ecology; an expert in tropical forest soils; an expert on plant taxonomy, well versed in plant collecting and preserving; and a medical officer at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, London.
· The new forestry training and demonstration center in Bangui was recently inaugurated by the Minister of Development at a ceremony which was attended by Dr. B.R. Sen, Director-General of FAO, as well as by members of the Government and Diplomatic Corps and many other local and foreign guests.
Part of the training carried out within the scope of this United Nations Development Program project is in logging under difficult tropical forest conditions.
· Sawdust came into its own in the fight against oil from the tanker Torrey Canyon wrecked off the coast of Cornwall, United Kingdom, which threatened to pollute the beaches of the northern coast of Brittany. Tests in the area of Le Havre, where French navy vessels detailed to fight the oil slick scattered the harbor with sawdust, demonstrated its superiority over the liquid detergents used in southern England. Sawdust coagulates the oil at sea, whereas the use of detergents tends to wipe out marine life. The sawdust absorbs the oil and breaks it up into cakes, can be collected in nets and disposed of.
· Gerhard Speidel, Professor of Forest Economics at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and for two years project manager of the United Nations Development Program (Special Fund) project for the establishment of a national school of forestry in Brazil now located in Curitiba has writen a new German textbook on forest economics (published by Verlag Paul Parey, Spitalerstrasse 12, 2 Hamburg 1).
The book is intended, firstly, to serve as an introduction to forest economies for forestry students, secondly, to help forest managers in analysis and solution of practical problems related to economic aspects of the enterprise and, thirdly, to provide all those persons interested in forestry with a detailed explanation of the specific features of forest economies. Although many examples illustrate the solutions of problems frequently encountered in a forest enterprise, theoretical considerations are emphasized and provide a comprehensive account of the latest developments in this subject matter field.
A detailed bibliography of German publications on forest economies. particularly during the last three decades, complements this comprehensive textbook and stimulates further study of the material presented.
· FAO is operating two UNDP (Special Fund) forestry projects in Iran, one providing a forestry faculty at Karadj University and a forest rangers school at Gorgan, and the other to develop a, forest area in the north to demonstrate forest management and utilization.
· The disastrous floods which devastated north and central Italy in November 1966 evoked expressions of sympathy and brought practical help from many parts of the world. Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd., the largest chemical complex in the United Kingdom and the second largest in the world, offered help to the Italian Government in the form of 5 tons of Gramoxone to a value of $400,000 for use on arable land in the areas most severely damaged by floods - the provinces of Florence, Grosseto, Pisa, Rovigo and Belluno - to enable the farmers to carry out spring planting in 1967, which would otherwise be impossible in most of these areas. Some of the Gramoxone will also be used by the Italian Forest Service in eight centers to demonstrate how pastureland can be renewed without plowing, so avoiding the danger of soil being washed away.
· The Japanese petro-chemical industry is reported to have developed a type of plastic "paper" for newpapers. The Nippon Kokan Seishi enterprise has applied for manufacturing patents in 21 e countries and it is said that production is beginning on a large scale. The plastic newsprint is made from various synthetic resins - principally polystyrol and polyvinyl chloride - and can be made to varied thick-nesses. It is not elastic and lends itself to all kinds of printing, especially color. The cost is claimed to be no greater than that of ordinary paper. However, to dispose of vast quantities of plastic wastepaper is a problem which seems not yet to have been faced.
· A pulp mill designed for an annual capacity of 80,000 tons of dissolving pulp, in which a Swedish company has a majority shareholding, was opened in June. As raw material it uses eucalypts which are ready for harvesting only eight to ten years after planting. The Swedish company decided to make this investment in 1964, after an evaluation of profitability and market trends for the company's main products - wrapping papers and dissolving pulp.
The mill includes a new type of continuous digester designed for the prehydrolysis-kraft process, based on standard units but equipped with a new inclined top separator. Washing is effected partly in the digester as a "Hi-heat wash" and on three filters in series. The bleaching system is based on obtaining high brightness and superior viscose properties by applying only chlorine dioxide, sodium hypochlorite and alkali in a five-stage bleach. A fully closed white-water system is used in the finishing operations.
The forest lands actually acquired by the mill so far are modest, but once they are fully productive should cover 10 to 20 percent of the mill's requirements. The company intends to make itself entirely self-sufficient in seedlings from its own nurseries. Elite stands have been established for seed tree production.
· A letter from a recent FAO visitor reads:
"It may not be out of place to explain how one travels to the Solomon Islands. I left Sydney at 7.00 p.m. by jet and reached Nandi (Fiji) at 1.00 a.m. At 9.00 a.m. the same morning we left by an 8-seater aircraft on a 5 hours' nonstop flight to Port Vila (New Hebrides). Here the crew and passengers had to stay overnight in a French Polynesian hotel.
"In Port Vila is located the French-British Condominium Administration. There are subtle arrangements for the delegation of authority. For instance, the Department of Public Works is headed by a British official with a French deputy, while it is the reverse in the Department of Agriculture.
"The next day, at 7.30 a.m. we took off again from Port Vila with the same aircraft for another 6 hours' flight to the Solomons with a refueling stop on the island of Espiritu Santo. At 1.30 p.m. we landed at Honiara, the only town of the Solomons, on the island of Guadalcanal. In 1942 Guadalcanal was the theater of a most savage battle, and this can still be seen from the great number of shipwrecks emerging from the sea waters and the thousands of landing craft vehicles all over the beaches of the islands. In fact, the 25th anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea was celebrated during my stay in the Protectorate.
"I visited all stations and the logging camps on the main islands by 4-seater plane, sea-going launch and jeep. The total forest area is estimated roughly at about 2.6 million hectares, most of which is located on the two main islands of New Georgia and Santa Ysabel. The present forest area under commercial exploitation is about 76,000 hectares, all of which is on these two islands. Three major logging companies are now established. So far, all licenses have been issued for a 20 years' period. Logging operations are highly mechanized in view of the shortage of manpower.
"Forestry and forest industries development has a great future in the Solomons and should become one, if not the major, factor in the social and economic development of the islands. For the moment, the total output of industrial timber is around 30,000 tons per year, mostly exported as sawlogs to Japan.
"The forest flora of the Solomon Islands is poor as compared with tropical southeast Asia, the main characteristic being the total absence of Dipterocarps, also the great wealth of hundreds of secondary species as they occur in the Indonesian archipelago is absent here. The final result is a more homogeneous forest well stocked with fewer commercial species. In fact, up to 80 percent of the commercial stock is made up of three important species: Ketekete (Campno-sperma brasii, Anacardiaceae), Baula Calophyllum kajewskii, Guttiferae) and Mudi (Dillenia salomonensis, Dilleniaceae). On Vanikoro in the Santa Cruz Islands, there are considerable forest areas with Kauri (Agathis macrophylla) as a dominant species emergent from a matrix of secondary hardwoods. Also throughout the freshwater swamps of the Solomons one finds extensive stands of Dafo (Terminalia brassi, Combretaceae)."
· The international staff of a UNDP (Special Fund) project operated by FAO for the establishment of a Poplar Institute at Izmir concluded their operations earlier this year.
The project report indicates that many parts of the country are suitable for poplar growing, which is not limited by the nature of the soil but rather by the availability of irrigation facilities and the need for preserving the fertile areas for crop farming. Intensive poplar growing should preferably be in row or small block plantations.
An inventory enabled a more accurate estimate to be made of the area under poplars in the various regions and their production. The requirements in planting stock for the coming years were also ascertained.
The poplars cultivated in Turkey until recently were clones of the species Populus nigra and nearly all of them belonged to the variety thevestina. The poplars introduced were mostly hybrids from western Europe, although there were some American poplars of the species P. deltoides; the willows cultivated in Turkey are usually Salix alba.
United Kingdom. Sir Francis Chichester aboard Gypsy Moth IV. (SUNDAY TIMES).
Cultivation practices were improved during the project through the introduction of new equipment and more efficient disposal of the workers in the field. Pruning tests showed that pruning reduced growth if done in the first year, whereas it had no adverse effect if done in August of the second year; the best season for pruning adult trees is the end of winter for the inland regions. Twelve species for use as green manure were imported. and trials are still under way.
Several studies were made to ascertain the profitability of growing local poplars and hybrids, compared with the most commonly cultivated farm crops. The rate of interest on land capital obtained from hybrid poplar plantations ranges from 6 to 9 percent, and sometimes is substantially higher for certain local poplars, especially in row plantations (when it may be as high as 30 percent). The cash returns on industrial crops such as beet and cotton, and on rice, are higher than those from poplars, while wheat and maize are less profitable.
· The feat of the yachtsman, Francis Chichester, in sailing single-handed round the world from Plymouth to Australia and back by way of Cape Horn, has everywhere stirred imagination and roused admiration. The problems of designing and building a very light, fast, racing yacht which could be handled by one man but was also capable of withstanding the storms of Cape Horn and of carrying all the stores and equipment of a long voyage were a challenge which the builders described as "more like designing an aeroplane than a boat."
The primary job was to design the hull down to the bare minimum of weight always with a sufficient margin of strength to meet extremely arduous conditions. The skin of the yacht was cold molded in multiskins. This means that the hull was made up of several layers, in this case six, of thin wood veneers glued together with the grain of each layer running in a different direction.
A hull of this type has to be built on a male mold or plug which in turn is built almost as a boat's hull with fore and aft planking on deep web frames. The mold of the Gipsy Moth was built upside down and the hull veneers were then laid on it. When the planking was finished the whole assembly of plug and hull shell was turned over and the mold removed leaving a very light plywood shell, reinforced only by the laminated mahogany centerline structure. After this, transverse laminated framing was fitted inside the shell and there-after building was as a conventional yacht. As far as the builders know, this was the longest yacht in which this special system of laminated construction has ever been used.
United Kingdom. A professional forester with the Forestry Commission in Warwickshire, W. J. Wilson, is a sculptor in wood in his spare time. His knowledge of the material and his ability to bring out its qualities are evident in the two examples shown here. "The Wood Chopper" as of beech and depicts the movement of an ax in chopping a log in two, "The Dancers" of acacia is on loan to FAO.
