Unloved forestry needs investment
Plantation forestry and logging make a bigger contribution to GDP than either sheepmeat and wool, or beef, and are ‘‘hugely important’’ to the environment, a new report says.
Forest Owners Association president Peter Clark said pastoral farming, and especially dairy, was avoiding paying for pollution, to the disadvantage of forestry. ’’We commissioned the report because we feel New Zealand is at a crossroads environmentally, and forestry is under appreciated and unloved,’’ Clark said.
Focusing just on logging and forestry, and not timber processing, the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) report says the plantation and logging sector accounts for $1.39 billion of New Zealand’s GDP, while its environmental value is at least $2b a year.
Clark forecast a crisis in several decades because of a lack of investment into planting. New plantings have plummeted from 100,000 hectares a year in the mid1990s to 3000ha in 2015.
‘‘What we need is equal treatment across all land uses. Land prices have risen fuelled by the fact that competing land uses are not facing their environmental degradation costs. That’s the elephant in the room and it needs to be addressed. The rest of society will get tired of the polluters’’
Plantation forestry production is worth $3.8b, which includes the GDP contribution. This includes $301 million in salaries and wages, $1.1b on capital and land, $2.4b on contractor services and $171m on freight.
The sector generates 9500 jobs and is ‘‘extremely’’ important to the regional economies of the Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Gisborne, Northland and Nelson.
Clark sounded a warning about the deforestation of plantations, which was occurring at the rate of 13,000ha a year. Plantation forests had been relegated to ‘‘some pretty hard country’’, which caused environmental degradation and erosion during harvesting and storms.