I. General considerations

IN the early days of history, forests were generally regarded as a no-man's land.

Primitive peoples did not countenance forests being appropriated by individuals, and this early feeling that the forest - and in general all uncultivated land - is common property, has been retained by many of the diverse civilizations which have since evolved. States, embracing all local communities, have thus tended to regard themselves as the owners of such lands. Under the feudal system, ownership of extensive areas of forest land in turn devolved on individuals and great families, and some such huge forest estates are still in existence today. The whole system of State-owned forests or of huge private estates was, however, mitigated by the common forest rights enjoyed by the peoples living on the forest borders.

Upon the dissolution of the feudal system, those who enjoyed common forest rights naturally became owners of at least a part of the big estates. In some areas, collective use became translated into collective ownership; in others, the holdings were divided into private domains. In the latter case, the pattern of forest ownership was decisively influenced by the laws and customs relating to inheritance. Where these decreed or favored the sharing of an estate among all the heirs, the forest holdings of individuals became continually smaller with successive generations. Also, individual ownership often extended not over a single compact holding but over a large number of scattered plots, frequently lying far apart from each other.

In more recently settled countries, individual forest smallholdings may have arisen in a different way. Although big trade enterprises were able, in certain cases, to secure ownership of vast wooded tracts, individual settlers tended to leave undisturbed the forest on the less cultivable parts of the land assigned to them, so creating isolated woodlands. In the aggregate, these relatively small areas often form a considerable proportion of a nation's forests.

Disadvantages of the fragmentation of forest lands

The fact that a forest tract is large, whether owned by the State, by a community or by a private person, does not in itself afford any guarantee that the forest is well managed. At the other extreme there is no reason why a small forest should not be carefully and intelligently maintained. The very smallness of its size, however, and the chance that its owner is of limited means, present an obstacle to good management. The deterrents are so great that in some countries, especially in Mediterranean Europe, fragmentation of the forest almost inevitably entails its destruction. At best, it is supplanted by trees commonly grown in association with agriculture, or by very open stands where timber production is merely accessory to the main purpose of grazing or the gathering of fruit or foliage.

But why should the small forest tend to be badly managed? The reasons are many. The chief is that the owner lets the forest go untended because it offers a poor financial return at long intervals. Yet this drawback can be avoided. There are certain kinds of treatment that will furnish a yield, if not yearly, at least at fairly short and regular intervals, even from a small forest. This, it is true, is not always possible, but all too often the owner, being technically ignorant, is quite unaware of what he could really get from his forest. One can hardly blame him, for he has other things to do.

What sort of person, then, is this owner? Two typical cases come to mind. In the first, he is a farmer, a part of whose farm is wooded. If the financial return from his woodland is a negligible fraction of his income, he has little inclination to give much attention to the forest, even though he may quite appreciate its advantages: wood for fuel, and sometimes even for building; a grazing-area too often abused; a source of litter and humus - as often abused - for his stalls and his fields. In the second case he is someone who, by purchase. chance inheritance or division of property, becomes the owner of a tract of forest. Perhaps living elsewhere and having no "sympathy" with the forest, he may think of it as an investment or a standby for lean times, but not as a regular source of income.

In either case, the fact that the owner of the small forest spares little thought for his forest until, rightly or wrongly, he decides to fell trees, puts him in a very weak position for selling them. Often he gets a comparatively small price for them. While it is true that piecemeal extraction of forest products is often unprofitable, this is not necessarily always the case: the small privately-owned woodland generally is, or could be, more accessible than the more extensive forest tract, for it usually lies nearer to roads and centers of population. In addition, it is often on more fertile soils and should give a proportionately higher production.

In many countries, if the small forest owner lacks technical knowledge, he can, theoretically, use the services of a professional forester. But the smallness of his holding does not justify his employing a full-time expert himself; and the cost of employing even a part-time forester would have to be set against any income his forest is capable of yielding. The case is the same if he wanted to make an outlay for forest improvement or for building up the forest capital. Particularly it is so when it is proposed to replant a cut-over area where for any reason natural regeneration is impossible; or when it is a question of planting to trees land no longer profitable to use for agricultural crops because of changed economic conditions in the area or in the family owning the land. Such operations are costly, and the expected profit, however large, will only come in the long-term.

Unless, therefore, the owner has some definite stimulus, it is most unlikely that he will do anything with his land. Maybe the forest will establish - or re-establish - itself, but it may well be of poor quality or may take a very long time to form. Many other factors may lead the private owner to neglect the upkeep or the establishment of a forest. In many countries, for instance, forest-grazing is freely allowed, and the animals, if not properly controlled, will seriously damage or destroy any natural or artificial tree regeneration.

There can, however, be too much generalization, and it has already been sufficiently stressed that the chief cause of the poor yield from small forests is indifference on the part of the owner. There are, however, instances where the yields from farm-forests make up the major part of a farmer's income. This holds good generally in Finland, often in Norway and Sweden, and sometimes in other heavily wooded areas like the French Landes. Under these circumstances, where the monetary return from the forest falls short of what could be obtained, failure cannot be attributed to the owner's lack of interest, but rather to some other factors that have been mentioned: the owner's lack of technical knowledge, the difficulty he finds in marketing small lots of timber, his shortage of capital for improvements or replanting. In addition, he may have to overcut or fell immature trees to meet immediate needs for fairly big sums to meet death duties or to buy urgently required farm machinery.

Remedying the small-forest situation

The situation as it is can be remedied in various ways. In certain cases it is possible to regroup scattered private forest-plots by exchange or purchase so as to constitute larger and more easily managed units. This manner of consolidation has often proved successful - in Switzerland, for example. But it is difficult to make a successful forest manager out of a smallholder with a few hectares, even by regrouping into one unit the equivalent of several originally scattered plots.

Another solution is direct State help in the form of subsidies in cash or kind or technical aid, or indirect, in the shape of taxation relief or market protection.

But the course calculated to rouse the small forest owner - giving relief to his isolation, to his technical shortcomings, and to the difficulties inherent in the smallness of his holding - undoubtedly lies in his associating in some formal way with other forest-owners who are similarly placed.

Associations of this sort may take the most varied forms, which are examined in the following pages where experience in many countries is also related. The information so given may be useful to those whose task it is to direct national forest policies, and who find themselves up against the problem of developing small private forests to full efficiency.

There are, first, two other points on which to comment.

Areas involved

It is often felt that private forests and their distribution in small plots are the concern of relatively few countries of the world. One might question therefore the need for any concentrated attention to the problems they present if one did not appreciate that those "few countries" were situated in world regions where forest production is now among the highest and already has a considerable economic and social importance.

Table 1, extracted from World Forest Resources, (FAO, March 1955) summarizes the situation in regard to those countries most frequently mentioned in the present paper, and it shows the considerable extent of private forest, even in some regions where forestry is little developed.

Table 1 does not show the whole picture, for it gives no indication of the fragmentation of private forests. Although the average size of such forests varies considerably from country to country, in almost all highly-developed countries with a considerable area of private forest, fragmentation is very marked.

Out of Norway's 7,500,000 hectares of forest, 6.3 million hectares, in round figures (excluding forests owned by commercial companies and corporations) are privately owned; of these 3.6 million hectares are farm forests with an average area of 27.3 hectares, but a quarter of the nearly 132,000 woodland-owners possess less than 2.5 hectares of forest, and 60 percent less than 10 hectares.

In Sweden, commercial concerns own about 25 percent of the private forests, and the area of farm-forests seems to be appreciably larger than in Norway. In Finland, where almost all private forests are farm-forests, the average private forest is about 34 hectares in extent. Out of 140 million hectares of commercially-exploitable private forest in the United States, a considerable area is owned by commercial interests or big estate owners, but 55 million hectares are shared among over 3 million farmers. The average size of forest farms is about 17 hectares, and while the average for all private forests together amounts to 32 hectares, only 1 percent of the total number of owners possess more than 200 hectares each.

The fragmentation of forest land is, however, much more intensified in other countries. In Western Germany, out of 693,235 forests of less than 100 hectares, 323,136 are less than 1 hectare in area (their average area being less than 40 ares). In France there were, in 1946, 2,359,000 hectares of private forests made up of woodlands less than 10 hectares in extent' often subdivided into numerous scattered parcels, belonging to 1,445,730 owners, out of a total of 1,528,707. Of the forests less than 10 hectares in extent, the average area was 1.5 hectares. Finally, in Japan, privately-owned forest land is distributed among somewhat more than 5 million proprietors, of whom 73 percent or 3,634,000 own less than one hectare.

On a world count, the total area of woodlands of less than 1 hectare each is only 1,740,000 hectares, or 15 percent of the total area of private forest; the average area of these small holdings is less than 60 ares. The number of persons owning more than 20 hectares each is scarcely more than- 1 percent of the total number of private owners recorded. But the total area of all private forests is just over one-third of the total world forested area.

The situation of the European Mediterranean countries is somewhat peculiar. Spain offers a typical case. The statistics of this country class as "forest" all the mountain rangelands, closely associated with the forest, and all scrub and heathlands on the national territory. These montes amount to somewhat more than 25 million hectares in area. Of this total, about 16,800,000 hectares are privately owned, the average holding having the comparatively large size of 16 hectares. It should be noted, however, that less than 46 percent of this total area is covered by fairly open mature stands composed largely of evergreen oaks, cork-oaks, sweet chestnut, and poplar and eucalyptus plantations; while more than 55 percent consists of scrub, grazing-land, alfalfa and other rotation crops.

Country	Forest area		Area by ownership				Private forests as percentage of accessible forests
	Total	Accessible forest	State forests	Communal Forests	Forest owned by institutions	Private forest
Europe	In thousands of hectares						Percent
Austria	3 139	3 139	471	292	446	1 930	61
Denmark	438	438	122	16	26	274	63
Finland	21 660	20 700	7 100	320	120	13 160	64
France	11 407	11 407	1 634	2 473	1	7 299	64
Western Germany	6 732	6 732	2 104	1 499	330	2 799	42
Italy	5 648	5 648	146	1 424	-	4 078	72
Netherlands	250	250	38	37	13	162	65
Portugal	2 467	2 467	100	-		2 367	96
Sweden	22 980	22 980	4 580	750	390	17 260	75
Switzerland	950	850	40	550	10	250	29
United Kingdom	1 661	1 661	383	-	-	1 178	75
North and Central America
Canada	341 963	130 168	107 719	-	-	22 449	17
Guatemala	5 450	2 250	500	-	-	1 750	78
Mexico	25 856	24 563	3 500	11 372	-	10 984	42
United States	252 530	191 830	45 330	6 880	-	139 620	73
South America
Brazil	480 195	120 048	72 029	. . . . . . . .		48 019	40
Chile	16 360	6 895	2 111	-	-	4 784	69
Paraguay	20 906	6 272	439	-	-	5 833	93
Asia
India	70 979	48 930	39 959	-	-	9 171	19
Japan	22 617	21 780	6 686	3 057	664	11 373	52

The figures cited above are thought-provoking. Leaving aside Eastern Europe and the expanse of the Soviet Union's Asiatic forest-land and that of China, it may be said that, in the temperate zone of the Northern hemisphere (i.e. in those parts of the world where timber-production is highest), at least 50 percent of production capacity is in the hands of private owners. This figure would loom much larger if Canada had not retained almost all forest-land under public ownership (although the farm forest problem has to be faced there as well). Moreover at least half of this area of privately-owned forest land is distributed among small owners whom it could be said that, on the whole, they have practically no technical knowledge and, particularly, no financial resources to enable them to derive full profit from the productive capacity of their forests.

Economic and social issue involved

The second comment to be made is that the existent pattern of ownership necessarily circumscribes any forest policy that a government may contemplate. This is especially so with the "farm-forest," strictly bound up with agricultural land tenure. The little farmer on whom ultimately depends the very life, if not of each nation individually, at least of the world as a whole, needs wood for his own use. He expects his farm-forest to furnish him with fuel, with fencing, with the small timber that he requires and possibly, too, with constructional timber for the upkeep and extension of his farm-buildings. The primary aim of forestry in such forests must, therefore, be the satisfaction of the farmer's needs; and this may have nothing in common with the kind of forestry aimed at getting the best from the forest soil in the interest of a well-planned national forest policy.

The influence exerted in this respect by the form of ownership must not, however, be overrated. Theoretically, a State which was or could be sole owner of the forests on national territory might well invoke a forest policy completely sacrificing local needs to the needs and activities of the country as a whole. In practice, however, this would be impossible since owing to the very difficulty of transporting over long distances primary forest products of low initial value, the populations near to the forest must inevitably benefit so far as timber needs are concerned, from the advantage of their location.

On the other hand, the farmer may no longer find it worth while contemplating procuring his timber needs from his own woodlands when improved communications enable him to satisfy his requirements elsewhere, perhaps more cheaply and without giving up valuable working hours to procure them. For instance, when coal or electricity furnish him with cheaper heating, he should need no persuasion to realize the advantage of transforming the coppice which once furnished his firewood into a high forest.

However, generally speaking, the small privately-owned forest - especially the farm-forest - is still looked upon as the recognized purveyor of local timber requirements. This is especially so in mountainous country and other areas difficult of access. So, as has been said, limitations are imposed upon any national policies relating to such forests, especially to plans for remedying their low productivity.