Role of Timber Trade in Conversion of Tropical Moist Forests

A main reason why tropical moist forests (TMF) are increasingly exploited is that more people want more wood. This applies not only to the tropical countries in question, but to communities of the developed world that increasingly look to TMF to meet their consumption demands. (This review is based on Economic Commission for Europe, 1976; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1978; Myers, 1979; Pringle, 1976, 1977, 1978 a,b.)

Estimates for the amount of wood cut worldwide in 1974 indicate that the total surpassed 2,500 million m[3] (Table 2). Of this amount, some 47 percent was used as fuel, over four-fifths of it to meet the needs of the developing world; 43 percent was used as timber for construction needs, for panels, and for other "solid wood" purposes, two-thirds of it to meet the needs of the developed world; and 10 percent was manufactured into pulp products, seven-eighths for markets of the developed world. By the year 2000, aggregate wood use could approach 6,000 million m[3], of which firewood could account for around one-third, solid wood for over one-half, and pulp products for at least one-sixth.

In short, consumption of wood is projected to increase by almost 135 percent during the last quarter of this century. This consumption trend will generate growing pressures to exploit those forests that have hitherto contributed relatively little to global timber needs, namely TMF. Although they contain about as much wood as their larger temperate counterparts, TMF now supply little more than one-tenth of total wood used worldwide as solid wood and as paper pulp.

CONTRIBUTION OF TROPICAL MOIST FORESTS TO INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN HARDWOODS FOR SOLID-WOOD USE

During the last three decades, there has been a rapidly growing demand on the part of developed nations for tropical timber, especially for hardwoods, the kind of timber that makes up over 90 percent of TMF (Table 3). Hardwood supplies many needs: housing construction; finished products such as furniture; and wood-based panels such as plywood, veneer, particleboard, and fiberboard. Of the world's hardwood forests, the great bulk are located in the tropics. Hardwood forests of temperate zones have been steadily depleted or are coming under greater protection in order to meet environmental interests, and, as a result, exploitation pressure is increasingly directed toward TMF.

After the economies of the developed world recovered from World War II, they began to import tropical hardwood timber, some 4.2 million m[3] in 1950 (Table 3). Within three decades, the volume has grown by almost 1,500 percent, and it is projected to expand by more than half as much again, to 95 million m[3] by the year 2000. True, tropical regions use a lot of hardwood timber themselves, but the amount has little more than doubled since 1950, whereas the developed world's imports have increased 15 times, and the total has recently surpassed consumption by all tropical countries combined.

The largest single consumer of tropical hardwoods is Japan, now accounting for over half of the developed nations' imports (Table 3). Between 1950 and 1973, Japan's consumption of tropical hardwoods increased 19 times, with three-quarters of the aggregate supply deriving from Southeast Asia. Among all Japan's imports, wood now ranks as a strong second to oil; the country depends on overseas sources for around two-thirds of its wood, a proportion that could rise as high as four-fifths by 1985 (some of the imports stem from North America, but hardwood imports almost entirely derive from the tropics) (Japan Economic Research Center, 1976; Kanamori et al., 1975; Tsurumi, 1976). Hitherto Japan has looked mainly to Southeast Asia for its hardwood needs, but it is increasingly directing attention toward Latin America and West Africa.

The United States is the second largest consumer of tropical hardwoods. U.S. demand has been growing at a rate far above the country's growth rates for population and GNP. This has been partly caused by rapidly rising costs of high-quality hardwoods from within the United States, following increased interest in the country's hardwood forests for their esthetic and recreational values. A more important reason is that plywood paneling can be obtained relatively cheaply from Southeast and East Asia; over four-fifths of U.S. imports of tropical hardwoods come in the form of plywood and veneer via Japan, the so-called Philippines mahogany that originates in Southeast Asia. Between 1950 and 1973, U.S. imports of tropical hardwoods increased 9 times (until the country was accounting for about 70 percent of all tropical plywood and veneer entering world trade), and by the year 2000 they are projected to double again.

The nations of Western Europe account for about one-third of the developed world's imports of tropical hardwoods, an amount that is projected to increase by about 75 percent by the year 2000. Most of the timber derives from West and Central Africa, though within the last few years there has been a marked expansion in hardwood imports originating from Southeast Asia.

By far the major source of tropical hardwoods to date has been Southeast Asia (Table 4). Between 1950 and 1973, the region increased its exports 24 times, until it was accounting for three-quarters of international trade in tropical hardwoods. Latin America, with around 3 times as many hardwood stocks as Southeast Asia, currently produces only 10 percent of the world's hardwood timber, and exports very little, due to the remote location of many of its hardwood forests. West and Central Africa export only about one-third as much as Southeast Asia. Plainly, however, the progressive depletion of Southeast Asia's forests will cause much greater exploitation pressure to be directed toward the two TMF regions that have hitherto supplied little to international hardwood trade, namely Amazonia and Central Africa. As harvesting technology allows loggers to extract timber from localities that are currently considered inaccessible because of such factors as difficult terrain or remoteness, and as processing technology enables more heterogeneous types of hardwoods to become acceptable on commercial markets, both Amazonia and Central Africa can be expected to increase their share of the hardwood timber trade.

CONTRIBUTION OF TROPICAL MOIST FORESTS TO INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN SOURCES OF PAPER PULP

While global consumption of hardwood products is expected to continue to expand, it is paper products for which the greatest growth in demand is projected. TMF contain relatively few stocks of the conventional source of paper pulp, i.e., softwoods. But the international paper trade now expects to depend on TMF for much of its raw materials, as a consequence of recent changes in forestry technology. Until the mid-1970s, it was thought that TMF, with their multiplicity of hardwood species, could not readily be pulped after the manner of softwoods. But new production processes now allow wood chips from some 100 selected TMF tree species to be simultaneously converted into pulp (U.S. Forest Service, 1978). TMF, comprising some 55 percent of the world's forests, currently produce only about 7 percent of the world's paper and paperboard--a percentage that could shortly start to grow rapidly.

During the period 1950-1970, world output of paper products increased from 40 to 130 million t for a growth rate twice that of population. If long-term trends continue, world demand could rise from its present level of around 180 million t per year to 400 million t by the year 2000, and to twice as much again after only a further two decades (Jahn and Preston, 1976; Pringle, 1977). The developed world now uses almost 160 million t of pulp a year, the developing world little over 20 million. An average developed world's citizen consumes an annual amount of over 155 kg of paper and paperboard (in the United States, 325 kg), while a developing world's citizen is unlikely to use more than 5 kg. (Many a citizen of Indonesia and Nigeria may not even account for 1 kg, roughly half of one copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times.) If consumption continues to grow as in recent years, the developing world is projected to expand its consumption roughly 3 times, as compared with a 2 3/4-times increase on the part of the developed world; thus by far the largest share of total consumption will remain with the developed world.

Whereas many nations of North America and Western Europe are self-sufficient for paper pulp or even produce a surplus, Japan is heavily dependent on foreign sources, almost half of its pulpwood now coming from overseas. Following recent increases in prices of U.S. softwood chips, Japan is turning to Southeast Asia and tropical America for hardwood chips, which now supply over half of its pulpwood-chip needs (Shimokawa, 1977).

Even though their consumption rates are presently very low, developing countries are strongly motivated to develop sources of paper pulp. They currently import the great bulk of their supplies, at a 1975 cost of $2 billion--worth almost two-thirds of developing countries' exports of tropical timber. To give an idea of low-level demand in developing countries, and of the amount by which it could expand, total newsprint consumption in 14 Asian countries, including all the most populous ones except China, now totals around 600,000 t per year, or less than Canada's. Not only does demand for paper increase with growing human numbers, it expands much more as a consequence of growing human aspirations. In particular, the spread of literacy serves as a powerful stimulus to demand--and in many developing countries, lack of paper is causing serious setbacks to education and communications. Within another decade, there will be a further 150 million consumers of paper in developing countries; by the year 2000, Southeast Asia is expected to need 5 times as much paper as in 1974. Indonesia, after paying out $92 million for pulp imports to meet 85 percent of its needs in 1977, feels strong incentive to use its own forest resources as a pulp source.

ECONOMIC VALUE OF TROPICAL WOOD TRADE

Between 1954 and 1976, tropical wood exports increased in value from $272 million to $4.2 billion. This represents a growth rate far faster than that for global trade in all forest products. Tropical wood exports now amount to around 4 percent of the value of all the developing world's exports excluding petroleum, making it one of the five most important export earners among major commodities produced by the developing world. In fact, tropical wood is now one of the fastest growing exports of the developing world, earning about as much revenue as sugar, cotton, or copper.

Yet, substantial and expanding as these export earnings are, trade in tropical wood nevertheless amounts to only about 15 percent of global trade in forest products. The Congo and Finland have land areas and forest estates roughly the same size, yet in 1973 the value of Finland's forest exports was 60 times greater than the Congo's. The six main countries of the Amazon Basin, plus French Guiana, Guyana, and Suriname, possess 2.7 ha of forest per person, compared with a world average of about 1 ha, yet they import more forest products by value than they export.

ECOLOGICAL IMPACT OF COMMERCIAL LOGGING

Due to the diversity of tree species in tropical forests, coupled with the reluctance of international timber markets to take more than a small proportion of wood types available, the commercial logger is inclined to harvest very selectively, taking a few choice specimens with disregard for the rest--a "creaming" operation. Of Amazonia's many thousands of tree species, only about 50 are widely exploited, even though as many as 400 have some commercial value. Africa exports only 35 principal species (albeit twice as many as in 1950), with 10 accounting for 70 percent of the total (Erfurth, 1976). In Southeast Asia, loggers focus on less than 100 tree species, with exports consisting mainly of only a dozen or so (Sumitro, 1976; Whitmore, 1975).

So when a patch of TMF is exploited, only a few trees, often less than 20 of 400 per ha, are taken. Yet the logging operation can leave many of the remaining trees damaged beyond recovery--far more than would be the case in a temperate-zone forest--because TMF trees are strongly linked together with vines, lianas, and other climbing plants, sometimes as many as 2,000 per ha and some of them 200 m long (Ewel and Conde, 1976). Commercial trees are often limited to the tallest which, benefiting from the sunlight, develop crowns as widespread as 15 m. When one of these giants is felled, it is likely to break or pull down several others with it. Furthermore, tropical trees are highly susceptible to attack by pathogens; as a result, a seemingly minor injury, such as a patch of bark torn off, can leave a tree vulnerable to irreparable damage. Logging roads and haulage tracks, sometimes averaging as much as 10 km for each km[2] of forest exploited, can, together with dumping zones and lands for logs, account for 10-30 percent of the forest area (Burgess, 1973).

Repeated surveys in Southeast Asia reveal that average logging leaves between one-third and two-thirds of residual trees damaged beyond recovery (Hadi and Suparto, 1977; Kartawinata, 1975; Suparto et al., 1978; Tinal and Balenewan, 1974). In addition, almost one-third of the ground may be left bare, in many instances with the soil impacted by the heavy machinery (Burgess, 1973). With greater care, the damage could be reduced by half. But less destructive exploitation would raise timber prices for the end-product consumer--something that the main markets (developed nations) are unlikely to accept on the grounds that it would be unduly inflationary.

Clearly, logging impact varies from area to area. In some places, the consequence is only light modification of the forest, while in other places it amounts to gross degradation. If the logging is highly selective, e.g., for mahogany, it is quite possible that the forest may never return to its original composition. If high-grading is less selective, it will still take many more than a few years for natural regeneration to fill the gaps caused by the removal of timber trees (G. Hartshorn, personal communication, Tropical Science Center, Costa Rica, 1979).

WOOD CHIPS

Forestry technology has recently developed processing methods that enable tropical hardwoods to be pulped in a single mixture (Chudnoff, 1976; Richardson, 1978). In Colombia, some 100 species are used in one operation, subsequently supplying 40 percent of the kraft and linerboard. In Papua New Guinea, a joint hardwood chip mill, established in 1974, accepts over 200 species at once. Similar operations are under way in Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Since the techniques can not only be applied to sound trees of any sort, but can be used to salvage defective trees and dead standing timber, it can expand the yield of a hardwood forest tract by as much as an additional 300 percent of usable wood (Keays, 1974).

Thus the extreme heterogeneity of TMF no longer presents a problem to the forest exploiter who seeks to manufacture wood pulp. This represents a welcome breakthrough not only for Japan, with its large and growing demand for wood chips from overseas, but also is of potentially enormous benefit to tropical-forest countries themselves, with their ever faster growing need for wood pulp.

Furthermore, some observers look upon this "any-tree/all-tree" harvesting, also known as full-forest harvesting, as an innovation that could represent some sort of salvation for TMF, at least so far as certain forms of wood exploitation are concerned. By enabling intensified production of wood products in a few selected areas, it could relieve extensive harvesting of wood from large tracts of forests. But other observers are inclined to believe that it could amount to a two-edged sword. Under this technique, a patch of forest is not exploited selectively, on a sustained-yield basis; segments are exploited entirely, once and for all. But, if a harvested forest is then replaced by a man-made forest, this intensive use both of the original forest and of the land on which it stood may help to confine timber harvesting to limited localities. Alternatively, full-forest harvesting can be conducted in scattered blocks, or in strips possibly up to 200 m wide (although no experimental studies in tropical forest management have shown 200 m to be the upper limit of clear-cut strips), whereupon the surrounding tracts of undisturbed forest will eventually enable the exploited zone to regenerate.

However, this sophisticated harvesting technique can work two ways: It can either hold out better prospects for many sectors of untouched forest, or it can presage total conversion for many sectors.

PLANTATIONS

In a few localities of the tropics, forest plantations are being established. These plantations now comprise around 85,000 km[2] (Lanly and Clement, 1979; Persson, 1975). Of this total, almost 40,000 km[2] are in Latin America (over half in Brazil), and the rest split between southern and Southeast Asia, and West and Central Africa.

To the extent that man-made forests supply the quantities and types of wood required by world markets, they reduce the pressure to exploit primary forests. So fast-growing are some plantation tree species (notably Eucalyptus spp., Gmelina arborea, and Pinus spp.) that a 500-km[2] plantation can readily produce 1 million m[3] of marketable timber per year, a volume that could be obtained only from 10 times as large an area of natural forest (Johnson, 1976, 1977). However, only 5,000 km[2] or so of additional plantations are established each year--only one-third as many as would be required to supply enough wood to relieve extreme exploitation pressures on TMF during the course of the next two decades.

In any case, tropical forest plantations are not without problems. They can prove costly to establish, $200-400 per ha. In common with many monoculture crops, they tend to attract diseases and pests that are numerous and varied. When plantation trees are harvested, they may take a large stock of nutrients with them, requiring ever growing amounts of fertilizer to maintain productivity.

The greatest expanse of tropical plantations, some 25,000 km[2], is in Brazil, one of the world's most impressive forestry accomplishments (Muthoo et al., 1977; Pringle, 1976). Less than 1,000 km[2] are located in Amazonia, with the rest in southern Brazil, where 13,000 km[2] comprise broad-leaved species and over 10,000 km[2] comprise conifers. In 1975, Brazil consumed 1.9 million t of paper, an amount that is expected to reach 4 million t by 1985. Although Brazil is now among the world's 10 leading pulp producers, it imported 700,000 t of pulp and paper in 1974, worth $349 million (Potma, 1976). As a result of its plantation program, established in the mid-1960s, Brazil aims to produce enough pulp to meet its own needs by the early 1980s, and, by the year 2000, Brazil plans to have an annual surplus of 20 million t of pulp for export to other countries of Latin America (worth, at present prices, $5.5 billion) (Ekström, 1976). This long-term program will require an additional 40,000 km[2] of plantations. During the 1970s, the average price of land for reforestation in some of Brazil's heavily populated southern areas has increased 11 times, so there is strong incentive to look for opportunity elsewhere--notably in Amazonia, where there are scheduled to be 10,000 km[2] of plantations by 1985. Nonetheless, even if all additional plantations of the next two decades were to be located in Amazonia, they need affect less than 1.5 percent of the present forest expanse.

From the standpoint of safeguarding primary TMF, the most appropriate strategy is to establish plantations in forest territories that have already been exploited and have become poor-quality secondary forest, degraded grasslands, or areas that have been overburdened by forest farmers. There are 440,000 km[2] of such misused lands in Indonesia alone--an area larger than the country's designated protection forests. A number of pioneer tree species, notably Albizia and Terminalia spp., can be made to grow satisfactorily in such areas. Regrettably, an outcome of this sort is generally precluded by at least two factors. First, a plantation entrepreneur seeks to locate his concession within an extensive tract of primary forest, so that he can exploit the hardwood timber to capitalize his plantation. Secondly, already cleared forestlands are generally occupied by settlements of one sort and another, and it is politically difficult to uproot them in order to plant trees.

A further problem arises, one that could severely reduce the expanse of plantations to be established anywhere in TMF countries. This concerns the scale of investment that will have to be made available for plantations (plus associated processing industries) if they are to make a sizable contribution to tropical timber supplies during the foreseeable future. FAO and World Bank estimates run as high as $3 billion per year over the next two decades. In face of investment requirements of this magnitude, TMF countries are increasingly looking toward the foreign investor: Half of Latin America's total sales of paper and paperboard have recently been accounted for by affiliates of U.S. timber corporations (Gregersen and Contreras, 1975); and Brazil has just reached agreement with 11 Japanese companies for a $1 billion, 4,000-km[2] pulp project. Yet foreign investors are not moving into the field of tropical plantations as fast as they might. They are not sufficiently assured concerning security of prices for their products, or security of tenure for their holdings. Each inflationary upheaval in world currency systems, and each nationalization of a foreign enterprise in a tropical country, defers the day when enough plantations will be established to relieve the more excessive timber exploitation pressures on TMF. Considering that plantations require a lead time of at least 10 years before they start to produce wood in bulk, stabilizing a favorable politico-economic environment for the foreign entrepreneur is an urgent requirement.