Forestry Flavours of the Month: The Changing Face of World Forestry

By Alastair Fraser

Forestry touches on all aspects of human welfare in one way or another, which is why foresters need to play an active role in determining our collective agenda.

Alastair Fraser, a lifelong forester and the co-founder of LTS International, a forestry consulting company, explains how forestry changes with political cycles and how foresters can promote healthy forests at all times. He explores critical issues such as:

forests and their connection to coal;
forests role in combatting floods and climate change;
illegal logging in Indonesia, Laos, and elsewhere;
tactics to promote sustainable forestry management;
plantations as a solution to tropical deforestation.

From pulping in Sweden and Brazil, paper mills in Greece and India, agroforestry in the Philippines, pink disease in India and oil bearing trees of Vietnam, no topic is off limits.

Based on the authors life as a forester in dozens of countries, this account shows the breadth of forestry and makes a convincing case that forestry management needs to focus on managing change and achieving sustainability.

Whether youre preparing to become a forester, already in the field, or involved with conservation, the environment or government, youll be driven to action with Forestry Flavours of the Month.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: May 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524628918

Alastair Fraser

Alastair Fraser was a professional forester in the United Kingdom and dozens of other countries for fifty-five years before retiring. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in forestry from Aberdeen University and a doctorate from Edinburgh University, where he studied the interaction between climate and forests. He is the co-founder of LTS International, a forestry consulting company, and is also the author of the textbook Making Forest Policy Work.

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© 2016 Alastair Fraser. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/07/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-2892-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-2890-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-2891-8 (e)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Dedication

Foreword

I. Introduction

II. UK Forestry Research (1960 - 1971)

Wind Tunnels and Swing-Wings

High Explosions in Canada

Modelling Growth or How Much Carbon Dioxide can Trees Turn into Cellulose?

Woodman Spare that Tree

III. The Rise and Fall of Sustainable Management of Tropical Forests (1975 onwards)

Riots and Railways in Suriname

Emergency in Thailand and First Attempt at Sustainable Management of Asia’s Forests

IV. Forest Products (1973-85)

Forest Management in Greece

Timber Trend Studies

Feasibility Studies

Consequences of Inflation: Shipping Beech Wood from Scotland to Hong Kong

Wood Processing in Japan

Different Perspectives of the Pulp and Paper Industry

Pulping in Sweden

Paper Mills in Greece

Paper Mills in India.

V. Plantations as a Solution to Tropical Deforestation (1980-90)

Floating Pulp-Mills and Plantations in Brazil

Pension Funds in the USA

Plantations in Korea

‘Pink’ Disease in Kerala, India

Oil Bearing Trees in Vietnam.

VI. Energy, Agroforestry, Mangroves and Desertification (1976-88)

Charcoal Everywhere and Charcoal-oil Mixtures in Guyana

Fuelwood

Sahel and Drought

Establishment of ICRAF

Agroforestry, ICRAF and River Flow in the Philippines

Ethiopia and Addis Ababa’s ‘Green Belt’.

Travels on the Amazon

Riverboats in Bangladesh

Troubles for the Tobacco Industry

Wood for Whisky Making

VII. The Rise of Intermediate Technology: Small and Medium Enterprises

A Tornado in Tonga

Small and Medium Industries in Honduras

Forest Extraction in Brazil

VIII. Trying to Tackle the Demand Side 1983-90

The International Tropical Timber Agreement

More Value Added

Furniture for the Miners in Russia

IX. Sustainable Forest Management and the Environment (1992-97)

Forest Radio Systems in Indonesia: Can Better Communications Stop the Rot?

The European Commission in a Fix

Trying Again in Indonesia (1991-2000)

Oil Palm Boom

Illegal Logging and ‘Certification’ in Indonesia

Illegal Logging in Laos

Forests and Floods

Smallholder Plantations in Laos

X. Participation and Budget Support (1997-2002)

Stakeholders Become Involved

Transaction Costs

Poor Advice for Indonesia

XI. Poverty and Climate Change (2002-06)

The Poor are Discovered

Coordinating Development Assistance

Climate Change and REDD+

REDD+ in the Mekong Region

Carbon Neutral Transport Corridors

Wood and Silicon Chips

Forests and Coal

Full-Circle: Carbon Dioxide and Airships Again

After the Wars in Cambodia

XII. What next?

The Future for Forestry

What About ‘Food Security’.

Conclusions

Bibliography

About the Author

Table of Figures

Figure 1. A tree in the 24 ft. diameter wind tunnel at RAE Farnborough for measurements of drag forces

Figure 2. Deflection tests on one of the instrumented trees for calibration

Figure 3. View of Michaelston forest from across the valley, showing the larch forest and the plots created to test the growth of trees planted under different crown densities

Figure 4: Water stop on the Suriname narrow gauge railway

Figure 5. Remains of old bucket dredger in abandoned gold mine in Suriname

Figure 6. Pump trolley on the narrow gauge railway in Suriname

Figure 7. Fine, spruce-pine fir forest in central Greece

Figure 8. Loading a container with Scottish Beech for shipment to Hong Kong at the former Hardengreen sawmill

Figure 9. Sorting cargoes of imported mixed logs in Osaka harbour according to species and quality to maximise utilisation

Figure 10. Typical sawmill in developing country with waste everywhere

Figure 11. A plantation of clonal Eucalyptus in Lao PDR showing how the trees are almost identical

Figure 12. 12 year old plantation of pine in Korea used for the cultivation of Shitaki mushrooms grown on stacks of wood under the tree cover.

Figure 13. Seriously eroded land near Busan, Republic of Korea, most of which was restored by terracing and tree planting.

Figure 14. Brick kilns in Minas Gerais, Brazil, used for making charcoal for steel making

Figure 15. Large-scale charcoal making in Suriname using earth kilns

Figure 16. Charcoal making with portable steel kilns from dead elm in Scotland

Figure 17. The temple city of Pagan, central Burma

Figure 18. Felling the last tree near Pagan, Burma

Figure 19. Old lady blowing to boost the fire to heat the pot, near Pagan, Burma

Figure 20. A household’s stock of firewood, near Pagan, central Burma

Figure 21. Addis Ababa ‘Green Belt" with young coppice in the foreground and degraded plantations behind (1985)

Figure 22. Tobacco ready for loading into curing barns in northern Thailand

Figure 23. Skidder mounted chipper with grapple crane used for harvesting tree residues as boiler fuel for a whisky distillery

Figure 24. Polythene solar heated timber drying kiln set up in Honduras

Figure 25. Simple cableway system used in Brazil for harvesting plantation grown Eucalyptus logs

Figure 26. Clearance and burning of forest for oil palm

Figure 27. Lorry carrying squared logs from Laos, broken down at the roadside in Vietnam.

Figure 28. Map of Unexploded Ordinance sites in Xepong District, Savannakhet in southern Laos (each red dot is where a bomb was dropped according to USAF records)

Figure 29. Raw materials used in manufacture of silicon; charcoal (left) and quartz (centre) and the result pure silicon (right)

Figure 30. Open-cast coal mine under former forest in South Kalimantan, Indonesia

Figure 31. Undisturbed forest north of the town of Son Monorem in Mondulkiri Province

Figure 32. Squared baulks of timber from illegally felled trees destined for Vietnam and impounded by Cambodian Authorities (the tip of the iceberg)

Figure 33. Denuded catchment of Binga hydro-electricity reservoir with serious erosion in Luzon, Philippines

Figure 34. Typical small sawmill in a developing country with high proportion of waste and no attention to health and safety.

Dedication

To Susie, Ian, Neil, Michelle, Helmi, Aisyah and Ariq

For your understanding during my many absences

Foreword

Forestry Flavours of the Month is a delightful and compelling read on changes in world forestry spanning more than five decades. What made this book stand out for me, and I believe will for development professionals in general, is how firmly Alastair has anchored the issues and challenges of world forestry in the global political economy. He does so without compromising the scientific rigor or focus on human welfare, particularly of the disadvantaged forest-dependent rural communities in the developing world.

Using his more than five-decade professional journey as the canvas, Alastair has effectively and efficiently painted for us the ups and downs of world forestry. The book traces the historical shifts in world forestry from a production and plantation forestry focus in 1990’s to a paradigm shift to a forest-ecosystem services approach for addressing global poverty reduction and climate change challenges, particularly since early 2000’s. This discourse takes us from forestry research in ‘wind tunnels’ in U.K. to a multitude of global and local initiatives for sustainable forest and plantation management in the Amazon and other parts of Brazil, India, Greece, Indonesia, Suriname and lastly to the socio-ecologically rich continental Southeast Asia.

Alastair does not shy away from clearly laying out the failures of international development assistance and donors in contributing to the current dismal condition of world forestry in general and tropical forests in particular. Furthermore, in using a forestry lens to trace and diagnose global developmental challenges Alastair draws our attention to a critical and persistent problem of short-termism that has bedevilled global sustainable forestry and development initiatives and investments

In addition to foresters, development practitioners in general will be well served by this book. It lays bare the adverse consequences of the short-termism curse for the global environmental and human welfare. Alastair, challenges the development professional community to find ways and means of reconciling the long-term time frames needed for sustaining forests and economic development with the short-term time frames within which political, economic and technical agencies function.

Having had the privilege of working with Alastair Fraser for the last decade and a half in Asia and benefitting from his expertise and experience, I believe this book will be equally, if not more, enriching to foresters of today and tomorrow. It should inspire current and future generations of forestry professionals. I hope this book will guide and inform the next generation of international forestry and development professionals in equipping themselves with the knowledge and skills that will be needed if global environmental and developmental challenges are to be met with greater success in the future.

Javed H Mir

Former Director, Southeast Asia Department

Asian Development Bank

I

Introduction

Dawn somewhere over Bangladesh and we are woken for breakfast by a stewardess with a tray of orange juice. Long haul flights by oneself can be enlivened if one is fortunate enough to have someone in the neighbouring seat who is interested in chatting. Over the years of travelling to many parts of the world, I have found myself sitting next to an Ambassador, various types of business person, an accountant, a geologist, an engineering consultant, a retailer and many others. This list shows that the conversation often turns to What do you do? In my case my response is I am a forester, and the response is equally often Oh! that sounds interesting - do you plant trees? I have never met anyone with any real idea of what such a job entails. monoculture tree plantations and tropical deforestation are widely held perceptions of what forestry is all about. There are a number of reasons why this may be so, and this book sets out to describe the range of activities that I have been engaged in and in the process give people outside the profession an idea of the sort of things that a forester gets up to during a working career spanning about 55 years.

It is not intended primarily as an autobiography, nor as a scientific treatise, but instead reflects on some of the topics that I, as a forester working internationally, have had to deal with and interesting or important issues raised by many of the assignments. It also gives a view of what the forestry profession as a whole has been doing during the period from 1960 to the present. The title for the book came to me one day, when chatting to a friend about what I had been up to, and it seemed to me that over the years I had been involved in a very wide range of issues, almost all of which had relatively quickly become a ‘hot topic’ and then almost as quickly had disappeared and been replaced by some new ‘hot topic’

As I write this, the subject of global warming and climate change seems to be the ‘hot topic’ that is involving many foresters, because forests play an important role in the atmospheric exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and the latter is considered one of the main culprits in creating a greenhouse effect that is contributing to atmospheric warming. It is eight years since Al Gore presented his documentary An uncomfortable truth and already the world seems to be getting bored of the subject. Recent opinion polls suggest that the proportion of the population that believes in global warming and climate change is declining steadily, and so it may not be long before the politicians lose interest and switch their attention to some other issue, but more on that later.

Reflecting on what has been going on in the world during the past half century; apart from wars and conflicts of one kind or another, there are the obvious trends of technological development and population growth that have led to greater wealth for some, but probably a decline in living standards for those unfortunate enough to have been born in the wrong place and lack the education or political influence to protect their interests. Human greed has always been around, and technology development and the need for raw materials to support the technology have allowed a relatively few individuals and countries, to exploit the situation and become very rich, while the majority have been left behind. Maybe, it is a sense of guilt that has prompted a few rich individuals and countries to offer financial assistance to poor countries in the name of ‘development’. However, this financial assistance usually has strings attached and is often used to gain political or commercial influence or personal aggrandisement.

This is the macro-environment within which those foresters who choose to work internationally must operate. Because forests have been steadily reduced and have been relegated to the remoter corners of most countries, a forester’s work usually requires visiting these remote areas and meeting many of those unfortunate enough to have been bi-passed by growth and development. Later, we will look at some of the driving forces behind this continued destruction of forests. Despite the fact that the World Forestry Conference in Indonesia in 1978 had the theme of Forests for the People, very little was actually done in practice to look at the impact of forestry practices on incomes of rural people and poverty until quite recently. Although the poorest rural dwellers are generally in the areas where there are still forests, the forests are not the cause of the poverty, but the poor communities have rarely been the beneficiaries of the exploitation of the forest resources, more often bearing the cost of the environmental degradation, just as the majority of the population in most oil rich countries rarely benefit very much from the wealth that lies beneath the ground. In some countries, notably Scandinavia, forestry has brought jobs and wealth to those living in the rural areas, as a friend and I experienced during practical work in Sweden. Only in a few countries have forests really benefited the people living in rural areas by providing well paid employment for some and additional income for those fortunate enough to own some forest. In these countries, real poverty in rural areas has been more or less eliminated, though there is still relative poverty due to lack of public services.

Because ‘international development’ is politically driven, it tends to reflect political cycles in the wealthy western countries that provide most of the funds. These cycles are relatively short-term, since the average life of governments is only four or five years, and if one looks back over the past fifty years it is possible to see how certain topics have dominated development for a few years and then interest has declined as new brooms have come into power with new political priorities. In my view, the media are also, at least partly, responsible, since it has a short attention span and there is a tendency for a topic such as the environment to be flogged to death for a while, and then dropped. Changes in the overall global economy have also had an influence as recession or inflation in the economic cycles have coloured society’s priorities

The concept of sustainability has been applied to forest management since long before the politicians found it and introduced it into the politically correct lexicon. However, politicians and businessmen make it almost impossible to practice sustainable forest management, because they want to maximise revenues and profits now, and are not prepared to invest in sustainability. There are trade-offs between what resources we use today and what will be left for the future. If humans were really committed to sustainability, those extracting and selling fossil fuels would be required to re-invest part of the proceeds in an alternative energy source that will produce in the future the same amount of energy that they have extracted. This would result in a gradual switch from fossil fuels to more sustainable renewable fuels over time and would prolong the life of the remaining fossil fuel resources for future generations. It would increase the cost of the energy now but would promote much more careful and efficient use. However, we have become so used to a high-energy lifestyle that people seem unwilling to accept higher energy costs and politicians are too timid to promote such a concept, so that it is probably no longer possible to implement and enforce such ideas.

Forests are usually referred to as a renewable resource, but this requires that they are protected from encroachment and illegal logging and are either allowed to regenerate naturally or some interventions are undertaken to promote regeneration. This costs money, since some additional expenditure is required to protect and tend the forest, which reduces the net income in the short-term while no one can guarantee that the income stream will continue into the future. The so-called ‘invisible hand’ of the market does not work for forests, especially for the genetically rich and diverse tropical forests. In fact many economists recommend that forests should be ‘liquidated’ as quickly as possible in order to realise the capital value and invest it in more profitable ventures. This argument, however treats forest in the same way as mineral resources, and takes no account of the ecological, environmental or social impacts of the loss of forest. By the time that environmental problems such as landslides and flooding, the extinction of a species due to habitat loss, or frequent droughts due to loss of tree cover, have become serious, it is almost certainly too late or too costly to restore the forest. It is very difficult to know for sure how much of the cost of such disasters can really be attributed to the loss of forest and so no one has ever really attempted to measure the economic impact, though nowadays attempts are being made to assess the value of those forests that remain in terms of these broad economic benefits, and to try to get beneficiaries to pay. Thus there are now a few examples of conservationists raising funds to pay for protecting areas of forests to safeguard habitats and of users of water for hydro-electricity generation and irrigation, paying to manage the watershed to minimise the risks of erosion and flash floods.

In Europe, most forests had been destroyed by the end of the nineteenth century, since when, replanting has resulted in forest areas increasing again, but these planted forests tend to be mainly stocked with just one or two tree species and so have less species diversity than the natural forests that were destroyed. Think how many animals and birds that once roamed the forests of Europe are now extinct? However, the temperate forests that covered Europe and North America have much less species diversity than the tropical forests, and most of the tree species have been retained in small woodlands and hedgerows so that given time and careful management areas that are planted or protected may come to resemble natural forests again, though many now have exotic tree species imported from other parts of the world but do not have all the associated fauna and flora.

In the tropics, where species diversity is so much higher, man-made forests can never replace the natural forest with their multitude of habitats for thousands of species. The ‘invisible hand’ may result