Positive Outlook from Agriculture Minister
By 250 News
Monday, December 12, 2005 03:55 AM
Agriculture Minister Pat Bell says he believes if we change the way that we look after our forests in the region, we can escape the down fall in the forest industry which he believes would come in 10 to 12 years.
Pointing to Dunkley’s TFL where they have grown their cut by nearly 60% with good forest practices, Bell says it is possible for us to maintain the cut. "We need to learn how to grow our forests better just as they do in for example Germany "said Bell "and if we do, we will escape the down turn when the beetle wood runs out."
"Simple math dictates" he said, "Grow 100 trees in 100 years and harvest one a year. Grow those same trees in 50 years and the numbers grow by 100%." He is more optimistic about the future "I don’t think we're going to hit the wall in the next 5 to 7 years, as some have suggested" says Bell, He believes companies such as Ainsworth and CH Anderson will off set the cutting problem and the mills will have enough saw logs.
But if we don't change the way we look after the forest "Idon’t like the options if we don’t change our way."
The bigger picture he said can be seen in what Finning has done. In 1998 they were at a low of about 70 jobs. Today that number is growing to 153 and a good chunk of that employment is due to the increase in mining activity. To make it all work Bells says, " we need to look again at the way we have been doing business. "
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Posted by: gypsy on December 12 2005 11:30 AM
So, we start next year (dream along!) and we wait 50 years. On top of that, the 50 years is not a sure thing. It is a prediction which one cannot be sure of until a few decades have passed. If one continues to eat up existing traditional wood with Annual Allowable cuts brought down to traditional levels, and the predictions are off in numbers, the agony is simply prolonged.
BTW, we have been gearing up to the short term higher AAC, thus the bit of an economic upturn. That is not a sustainable AAC by any stretch of the imagination. Thus there will eventually be a drop back down to the "norm" until we can see evidence of a true reduction in the average growing years to harvest.
Hopefully not all our leaders will continue to stick their heads in the sand so that we can get on with solving the intermediate term problem of the next 3 or 4 decades.