Poll after poll reaffirms that Australians, by and large, want the remaining stands of old growth forests protected. The Herald-McNair poll, released on February 15, revealed that nearly half the population want export woodchipping phased out by the year 2000. Notably, a sizeable proportion say that they are also concerned about jobs. This sentiment puts increasing pressure on governments and the timber companies, both of which have dished out a lot of misinformation. What exactly is being destroyed right now and just how viable is the woodchipping industry in Australia? Green Left Weekly's PIP HINMAN spoke to RICHARD BLAKERS, a former part-owner of a sawmill in NSW's south-east and an environmental scientist, about some of the issues.
When the federal government announced, at the beginning of February, that environmental impact assessments would be done on 57 of 509 coupes temporarily held back from woodchipping by Paul Keating, Blakers was immediately suspicious. He, along with another scientist, had spent nearly eight weeks late last year preparing a high conservation value assessment of the same areas in the south-east of NSW.
"The brief we were given was to identify logging compartments — about 200 hectares — that contained old growth forests." Quite a lot of the compartments that Blakers recommended for protection contained coupes (30-40 hectare areas) that had already been logged. Recently, the timber industry managed to get front page coverage for pictures of devastated forests and gravel pits, in an attempt to make out that conservationists' calls to halt logging in old growth forests were extreme to the point of absurdity.
"Just because one part of a 200-hectare compartment has been logged doesn't mean that the remainder of the forest should therefore be logged", Blakers points out. Those compartments which contained only small pockets of high conservation value forest were excluded from the protected list because "while they were important, they were not of sufficient importance to rate the whole compartment as high conservation value forest".
Blakers, who became involved in the anti-woodchip campaign only a couple of years ago, is well qualified to assess the issues in the woodchip debate. Apart from his involvement in a small hardwood mill producing furniture, he has a degree in zoology, an environmental management diploma and experience working for environmental management consultants. He has prepared environmental impact statements for the hydro-electric authority.
Funding for the high conservation value assessment came from the federal Department of the Environment via state and local conservation groups. In order to do any on-site assessment, Blakers had to know which areas State Forests planned to log. This proved extremely difficult. Eventually, he was forced to resort to the Freedom of Information Act.
The data sheet Blakers used was developed with advice from the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University. "We identified 10 different criteria of high conservation value forests and carried out a standard 40 x 40 metre survey plot in two or three different sites in each logging compartment. From that we were able to develop an empirical ranking system which enabled us to give each different logging compartment a number of points depending on the conservation value of the forests within that compartment.
"The criteria we used involved looking at the age structure within the forest, including whether the trees were young, old, mature or senescent [very old with hollows]. We then looked at the structural diversity of the forests to assess the range of habitats."
The senescent trees are particularly important because they provide homes for most of the arboreal mammal population. When parts of the forest canopy die, leaving holes in the upper crown, gliders, possums and owls hollow them out and use them for shelter.
Why, given the comprehensive study already undertaken, did the federal and state governments insist that new and fast-tracked reassessments be done? It could only have been to arrive at a different assessment.
Blakers expressed concern that the EISs which are still to be done may contain a clause — inserted by the timber industry — which states that only forests which are 100% old growth be regarded as high conservation value.
He is also concerned about the criteria State Forests will use in reassessments of the coupes. "If you set very narrow criteria, you can exclude almost any sort of forest from being identified as high conservation value."
Reserve system
There's an immediate need to set up an adequate representative reserve system, Blakers said. "The highest quality land is under freehold, and it is generally cleared. The next grading and quality, the state forests, is up for logging in one form or another. The very poorest land is held in the national parks and reserves." This is hopelessly inadequate, Blakers said. "Native flora and fauna need areas of high biological productivity to survive."
"The most fertile land supports a greater variety of plants. And plants with high nutrient foliage support a higher density of native fauna which, in turn, support predators such as owls, tiger quolls and some of the endangered species.
"All these species are endangered because they rely on high fertility sites, and the national parks system contains virtually no such areas."
Blakers explained that apart from producing the nutrient foliage that animals need, these sites also produce the best timber — the reason State Forests wants these sites logged. "This is why there's such a conflict between the need for an adequate reserve system and the requirements of the chipping industry."
Contrary to its propaganda, Blakers describes the timber industry as "woodchip-driven". When it began in the early 1970s, woodchipping was supposed to collect the crowns and logs that were unsuitable for the sawmill. "Twenty-five years later, it's the reverse", says Blakers. "Woodchipping takes 90% of the resource."
Once there were eight sawmills in the south-east; today there are two — Eden and Bombala. According to Blakers, by 2010 there will be no old growth sawlogs left. "Even the Forestry Commission admits that after 2012 there will not be enough sawlogs in the regrowth area to support the sawlog industry."
Blakers says the industry will be forced to close down between 2010 and 2030 "while native sawlogs regrow in the state forest". Plantations will not grow fast enough to produce sawlogs in that time. "A sawlog takes 50-60 years to grow — even longer for a really good quality one."
Blakers strongly believes — although he doesn't have the figures to prove it — that there is not enough volume in the native regrowth to support a woodchipping industry. "Once the woodchip industry has finished cutting through the old growth resource, it too will fold."
An old growth forest may produce 100-150 tonnes of timber per hectare; a regrowth forest can't provide anything like that amount. But exactly how much volume is produced after five, 10 and 15 years of growth is the sort of information State Forests refuses to provide. Blakers' guess is that it may be only 20-30 tonnes a hectare.
State Forests hasn't published anything to justify its assertion that what it is doing in old growth forests is sustainable beyond the first cut. "All they do is try to justify the original logging", said Blakers. "There is nothing that I've seen that would suggest that they have any serious intention of managing this regrowth forest once the old growth forests are gone."
As for jobs, Blakers estimates that the forestry work force in the south-east has been halved over the last 10 years. "The jobs issue is a red herring run by the industry to try to take the focus away from the real question — resource management.
"Twenty years ago, when the woodchip mill was first set up, woodchipping might have been a reasonable option given that markets were not around to take advantage of appearance-grade hardwood — the high quality hardwood timbers — and the technology really hadn't been developed to maximise the potential of Australian hardwood. But that situation has changed dramatically. Across Australia, there is a lot of work being put into developing value-added industries from native timbers and developing products such as appearance grade hardwood timbers for house fittings and furniture."
This too has to be based on plantations, not native forests. "If we want a long-term sustainable timber industry, we have to go into plantations where you have a lot more control — the growth rates and harvesting — over the product right from the start."
While the south-east region hasn't a lot of land suitable for plantations, Blakers believes there is enough to support a value-adding industry "that would employ at least as many people as the woodchipping industry does currently". As well, value adding is a highly intensive and diverse industry — "the sort that is better for local communities to operate".
According to Blakers, value-adding timber industry becomes even more important in the context of the increasing competition Australia faces as a world supplier of hardwood chips. In 1969-70 Australia supplied something like 80% of Japan's chip requirements. Since then, Portugal, Spain and Brazil, where there are 2-4 million hectares of eucalypts planted specifically for the pulp industry, have become strong competitors.
Many Japanese paper manufacturing and wood pulp companies have already signed joint ventures with the Brazilian government to establish hardwood eucalypt plantations. South America's high rainfall means far superior growth rates compared to Australia. Even under the best of conditions, "we can only get up to 15 cubic metres per hectare per year growth rate out of a plantation, whereas in Brazil they can get anywhere between 35 and 50 cubic metres per hectare per year.
"It is unacceptable in this day and age for the timber industry to base itself on the wild resource — the old growth forests."