‘Zero market’ for wind-felled rimu

A law change allowing limited harvesting of windblown rimu on West Coast conservation land may founder simply because there is no longer a market for the wood, a South Island sawmiller says.

The West Coast Windblown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill was passed under urgency on Thursday night to allow native wood blown down by Cyclone Ita in April to be salvaged from the conservation estate.

It is believed 20,000 hectares of West Coast forest were felled and a further 200,000ha damaged.

Would-be loggers will have to pay stumpage, a price paid to landowners for harvesting rights, of about $250 a cubic metre for rimu and about $60 for beech. But also, much of the wood can only be removed by helicopter, which may make margins slim.

‘‘The logistics of harvesting are going to be enormous,’’ Patrick Milne, a forestry consultant and executive member of Farm Forestry Association said.

‘‘The history of logging natives on the West Coast is that if you’re breaking even, you’re doing OK.’’

Dean Sweetman, owner of Westco Lagan, said his company used to harvest rimu until logging of native forest effectively ended in the late 1990s. There were a few people still milling rimu but customers had turned to other woods because it was so hard to source. ‘‘Basically it’s a zero market, really.’’

Earlier this week, Forest & Bird also voiced concerns that the West Coast wood would flood the existing sustainable native timber industry. ‘‘The idea of not wasting timber may sound superficially sensible, but as soon as you look at the facts, the idea makes no economic sense at all,’’ Forest & Bird advocacy manager Kevin Hackwell said.

But UnitedFuture leader Peter Dunne, who visited the West Coast this month, said he was ‘‘pleased Parliament will enable New Zealanders to access it rather than leaving it to rot’’.

The bill, to expire in five years, specifically excludes World Heritage Areas, national parks, ecological areas and the white heron sanctuary reserve at Whataroa.

West Coast MP Damien O’Connor, one of two Labour MPs who crossed the floor to back the bill, said he supported it for the jobs it would create, but still had reservations.

‘‘The market for indigenous timber has shrunk so that last year only 2000 cubic metres of rimu was sold in the country . . . They have to dribble it out on the market. If they dump 4000 cubic metres in one year, it would just collapse the market.’’ The bill also did not give West Coasters first option to the wood, an amendment O’Connor had sought.

Labour had opposed the bill because it was being rushed through and because it believed the fiveyear window should be cribbed back to two years, O’Connor said. ‘‘Most of [the logs] will be severely degraded within two years.’’

Others fear the logging could open the door to wider logging on the conservation estate.