Financial Stake 'Key to Sustainable Logging'
8/27/99
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Title: Financial Stake 'Key to Sustainable Logging'
Source: The Press
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: August 27, 1999
Glenhope forester Peter Topping believes truly sustainable
logging of native forests can take place only if the forests
are owned by people with a long-term financial interest in
their future.
Mr Topping has been sustainably felling native timber from a
block of almost 1000ha for 20 years.
He said the approval for Timberlands to log its beech forests
would result in the extraction of exclusively high grade
trees.
This was because of the corporate imperatives to which
Timberlands worked.
He said that even though the forest might be sustainable in
terms of having a range of age classes, the practice of "high
grading" would mean only low grade timber would remain after
15 to 20 years.
Wise forest management for the longer term required taking out
the lower grade trees and leaving the best to continue
growing, because they were the trees which would give the
greatest incremental wood growth.
Mr Topping said there was a ready market for much of the
so-called lower grade timber such as beech with the common
pinhole borer.
"I call it character timber," he said.
Mr Topping said the problem for large companies such as
Timberlands was their need to match the timber they supplied
to a market which would always demand the highest quality.
What was needed for long-term sustainable harvesting of
indigenous forests was to match the market to the wood
available.
He said it would be quite possible to develop a native timber
market in New Zealand but Timberlands's attitude had been to
push exotics locally and to export the native wood.
The ideal solution would be for the State to get out of the
industry and subdivide the indigenous forest blocks so they
could be taken up by people with bright ideas about how to
make a living from them, and a commitment to sustainability.
"What you need is a whole heap of innovators who have to make
a long term living out of the forest," Mr Topping said.