Today, Australia’s 1.9 million hectare plantation estate (53 per cent softwood and 47 per cent hardwood (ABARE 2008: 18)) supplies two-thirds of the forestry industry’s wood: native forests now supply only one-third. Further, in the immediate term (over the next two years or so), the Bureau of Rural Sciences (Parsons et al. 2007) projects a 60 per cent increase in plantation supply from its current production; taking plantation supply to 3.4 times the volume of wood currently logged from native forests. With large areas of managed-investment-scheme hardwood plantations established since the mid 1990s coming on stream, Australia is on the cusp of a plantation-wood resource shock.
Australia’s plantation-wood production continues to outpace its domestic wood consumption. Since 1990, plantation-wood supply has increased by an average 6.5 per cent per annum (coming off a solid base), whilst the amount of wood used to make all the domestic and imported wood products consumed in Australia grew by an average of only 0.8 per cent per annum (Figure 1).
Source: ABARE Australian Commodity Statistics & Australian Forest and Wood Products Statistics; Parsons et al. 2007 (BRS plantation wood-supply projections)
Little wonder that the Bureau of Rural Sciences’ projections indicate that Australia’s plantation resources are currently being logged below capacity (Figure 1). According to the Bureau’s projections and ABARE’s plantation wood-production data, 2 million m3 of mature plantation wood remained unlogged in 2007: equivalent to a quarter of the current annual native-forest log cut. Under-logging in the softwood estate explains 60 per cent of today’s unused supply (Table 1).[2]
|
Actual production 2006/07 (million m3 p.a.) |
BRS projected annual supply 2005–09 (million m3 p.a.) |
Excess supply capacity (million m3 p.a.) |
% of projected annual supply not logged in 2006/07 (%) |
|
|
Softwood sawlogs |
9.2a |
10.1 |
0.9 |
8.9 |
|
Softwood chiplogs & other |
5.1 |
5.4 |
0.3 |
5.6 |
|
Total softwood |
14.3 |
15.5 |
1.2 |
7.7 |
|
Hardwood sawlogs |
0.158 |
0.224 |
0.07 |
31.3 |
|
Hardwood chiplogs |
3.9 |
4.6 |
0.7 |
15.2 |
|
Total hardwood |
4.0 |
4.8 |
0.8 |
16.7 |
a. An estimated 0.27 million m3 of native cypress sawlog production was deducted from ABARE data.
Source: ABARE 2008: 20; Parsons et al. 2007: 8 (BRS plantation wood-supply projections).
With surging plantation resources and subdued markets — both domestically for wood and globally for hardwood chips (discussed later in this paper) — plantations have not ‘complemented’ or ‘topped up’ native forest-wood resources, as those in the native forest sector hoped. Rather, the new and highly efficient softwood plantation sawmillers have sent native forest sawn-timber production into permanent decline. The plantation-for-native-forest substitution process is about to be repeated in the hardwood-chip market.
[2] This static picture, however, masks the softwood sawmillers’ desirable run down of the large softwood sawlog stockpile that had accumulated by the early 1990s (Ajani 2007: 64) and what appears to be the beginning of an undesirable stockpile in the hardwood estate.