Old growth forests for carbon storage - Australia, Tasmania

Peg Putt MP
Monday, 28th January 2008

For Comment: State Parliamentary Offices of the Tasmanian Greens, (03) 6233 8300
The Tasmanian Greens today are unsurprised that a bleak outlook is forecast for Tasmania’s woodchip industry, even if Gunns’ pulp mill is built, and that pulp sales from the mill would also have to compete with low priced pulp from low cost South American producers, trends the Greens have repeatedly pointed out from their market analysis, now also reported by URS Australia in a consultancy to the Federal government (reported in today’s Australian newspaper).

Greens Opposition Leader Peg Putt MP said that taxpayer subsidisation of Forestry Tasmania had masked to a degree the fact that international markets are moving away from low quality native forest woodchip, and that in the era of action on climate change the best opportunity to make money from Tasmania’s native forests is to restore them to old growth to capture carbon and the dollars that will flow as carbon credits.

Ms Putt said that over recent years the big woodchippers had externalised risks associated with the market trend away from native forest woodchips onto forest contractors, not all of whom could survive, but that the woodchip companies and governments had played politics with the issue and put their energy into blaming conservationists for a trend actually precipitated by the establishment of massive hardwood eucalypt plantations in South America and south-east Asia.
“There is a bleak outlook for Tasmania’s native forest woodchip industry because higher quality plantation eucalypt is now available in large volumes at competitive prices from South America and south-east Asia, a trend that has been entirely predictable for years but has been masked by taxpayer subsidisation of Forestry Tasmania and the industry, together with the ideological determination to blame conservationists rather face up to reality,” Ms Putt said.

“Market trends mean that even if the pulp mill is built it will not be a panacea and contractors reliant on logging native forests for woodchip will continue to go out backwards, it’s dishonest of the government and of Gunns to lead people on about this and disgracefully blinkered that we don’t recognise the value in economic as well as environmental terms of restoring these forests to old growth instead.”

“Even the pulp mill will struggle to sell its product in competition with low cost producers, and we are very concerned that Tasmanian taxpayers will be locked into increasing subsidisation of Gunns pulp mill, which will end up as the monopoly buyer of woodchip dictating terms that suit the company’s bottom line.”

“The money generated from forests into the future will increasingly be through carbon capture, that is by retaining and restoring old growth forest and benefiting from carbon credits.”

“Tasmania has to break the stranglehold of the loggers on decision-makers if we are to be genuinely the clean, green and clever state, and if we are to stop throwing taxpayers dollars at an industry that is going down the gurgler because the rest of the world has moved on,” Ms Putt said.