Kiwi forest planting on its last legs

New forest planting has all but ceased in New Zealand, with forest investment companies claiming the Labour government’s support of the Kyoto treaty has made it impossible to attract investors.

One leading promoter of forestry investment projects, Roger Dickie, says the result of the Labour Government’s action in taking the carbon credits for forests under its Kyoto Policy has been a catastrophic decline in new plantings, down from an average of 65,300ha for the eight years from 1992 to 1999 to 10,600ha last year and probably less than 2000ha this year.

The Taranaki farmer, who has been at the forefront of forestry investment projects in New Zealand for more than 30 years, says he may have helped plant his last tree.

Like other forest investment vehicles, his company, Roger Dickie New Zealand Ltd, has halted planting. Dickie has joined with other forest owners to form the Kyoto Forestry Association, an organization battling to get the Government to review the carbon credits decision.

Mr Dickie is not overly optimistic about their outcome and fears that the result of the recent general election, which gave the Labour Party the opportunity to form a government with the help of minor parties, means the current situation will remain unchanged.

“We estimate with labour costs of around $3500 a hectare over the first eight years of a forest’s life, $200 million is being sucked from provincial economies, with a loss of around 8,000 fulltime jobs,” Mr Dickie said.

He said the only thing that could turn the situation around was for the government to immediately devolve a substantial part of the benefits arising from forest sink credits back to the forest owners, although even that would be too late for some of the support industries who rely on the forest industry for their livelihood.

“Last year one nursery dumped three million seedlings (enough for 3,000ha) because of the Government Kyoto policy’s effect on stopping new planting. A significant number of nurseries that relied on sales to plantation owners have gone out of existence because of this policy. If the decision was made now to give the credits back, the earliest we would be able to restart planting would be 2007 because new seedlings would have to be grown.”

Dickie, who has been behind the planting of 84 forests covering 25,000ha and involving 2500 investors, is in no doubt about what has stopped the inquiries from potential investors.

“There is absolutely no doubt in our minds that the Government’s Kyoto policy has emotionally turned investors away from forestry.

“Potential investors will have nothing to do with an industry where the Government intends to steal a large part of their ability to earn income. The pity of all this is that new forest planting has totally stopped.”

Mr Dickie says there is also a danger that existing forests will be felled before the Kyoto Protocol comes into effect in 2008, dumping thousands of tonnes of immature wood on the New Zealand market and wrecking the New Zealand forestry and wood processing industry.

“That is not to mention the loss of the credits these forests represent. All credits the Government is allocating come from our forests because without them there would be no surplus credits and nothing to allocate. This is the largest theft of private property rights in New Zealand history and the only comparable theft of this scale in the world today would be Mugabe’s land confiscation in Zimbabwe.”

Mr Dickie said that the great pity of all this was that the major benefits of forestry were also being lost.

“Forests have hugely beneficial effects for soil erosion, water quality, mitigation of storm damage and flooding, biodiversity and recreational activities.”

The Kyoto Forestry Association is urging all forest owners to support the New Zealand Forest Owners Association move to ban access to their forests or to supply information to government departments such as the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and Ministry for Energy.

“This ban is universally supported by forest owners and has Treasury and other senior government officials sweating – without a monitoring system in place by January 2007 the Government has no sink credits with which to subsidize or shield large emitting industries,” said Mr Dickie.