Fast-growing species used in short-rotation plantations are usually more profitable for industrial growers than plantations of species grown on longer rotations. There is usually a defined market with established prices for the timbers produced, and the short rotations mean financial risks are reduced. It is much riskier to forecast what the future market might be for sawlogs grown on a rotation of, say, 30-40 years.
But while such short-rotation plantations may be commercially successful, they may not be as useful to many rural communities because they do not supply them with the goods they once received from natural forests such as foods, medicines, animal protein and special timbers. Needless to say, these goods are often not part of the normal cash economy.
Nor do such short-rotation plantations supply many of the ecological services once supplied to the wider community such as hill slope stability, and the watershed and biodiversity protection that were once supplied by the original forests.
This is not to say that many new plantations do not supply some of these services - rather, it is that where such services are provided, they tend to be incidental to the main objective.
Two things might be said about this dilemma. One is that it could be short-sighted to disregard the market for higher quality timbers that require longer rotations. In most industries, there is always a market for high-quality products while the market for lower quality products can be easily saturated. There seems no reason, therefore, why there should not be scope for short- rotation plantations for producing pulpwood, alongside longer-rotation plantations producing higher quality timbers.
The second point is that there is increasing interest in establishing markets for ecological services such as watershed protection, carbon sequestration and biodiversity (e.g. Miranda et al. 2003). The impact of such markets on improving the economic attractiveness of specially designed plantations involving longer rotations could soon be significant (Echavarria et al. 2004). Together, these represent possible economic solutions to a major problem.
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Box 4. Measuring success and failure "Success", like degradation, is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. One viewer might define success as simply a well-stocked plantation of fast-growing trees. Another might take the longer view and say success was where a plantation's output covered the costs of establishment, and made the owner a profit. A government or development agency might take the view that success was when plantation establishment took place without government intervention - - when spontaneous plantation establishment occurred, when locally-owned nurseries raised seedlings for local farmers and when local processing industries began developing. Others might say that these were overly restrictive definitions and that some account should be made of the extent to which social and environmental benefits were created. The re-establishment of certain medicinal or food plants in the forest under-storey, for example, or the development of a multi-storey canopy structure with wildlife species present, stable water catchments and the restoration of key ecological processes such as nutrient cycling, may be indicators of success for some. These alternative approaches to judging "success" mean it is difficult to know when to make the judgment. The first approach (i.e. when trees are fast-growing) might be made at say, age five years. Some of the other approaches would obviously take much longer before it was clear that "success" had been achieved or not. An example of the dilemma comes from the experiences with Acacia mangium in Malaysia. Early experience suggested it was a very promising species over a wide range of areas, including highly degraded sites such as those dominated by Imperata cylindrica. As a result, A. mangium was widely planted. Then it was found that many plantations had trees with heart rot. It seemed all the plantations were failures. Several years later, it was found that early harvesting and careful sawing combined with kiln drying would allow the production of high-value cabinet timber. The failed plantations were, once again, successes. This suggests "success" (and "failure") can be difficult to determine and require a multi-stage evaluation. The final outcome may not even be that originally envisaged. Reasonable tree growth is often a necessary pre-requisite, but is not sufficient, by itself, to define success. (Durst et al. 2005) |
