THE CONFERENCE held in 1945 at Quebec, Canada, at which FAO was formally founded, had this to say: "The integration of forestry and forest products, as provided for in FAO's Constitution, fulfils a long-felt need. The practice of treating forests and forest industries separately has invariably resulted in bad forest management. Organized mainly with regard to the end products, and having little or no contact with the forests, the various forest industries tended to neglect their raw material problems and to think of each other as competitors in the exploitation of a natural resource rather than as complementary users of a renewable crop."
On this premise FAO activities have been based ever since, and this explains why FAO is inexorably involved in forest industries and their development.
Accumulating statistical data about forest products and undertaking a series of regional timber trends studies (Europe 1953, Asia-Pacific 1961, Latin America 1963, Africa 1965 and the culminating "Wood: world trends and prospects" presented to the Sixth World Forestry Congress in 1966), FAO built up a picture of future prospects in demand for forest products, and the problems which their supply would raise.
A group of six regional forestry commissions, embracing the whole membership of the Organization, were established to study these problems and propose solutions. In cooperation with the United Nations regional economic commissions, advisory groups on the development of forest industries were set up for Latin America, Africa and the Far East.
A series of major conferences on the development of pulp and paper industries were organized (Montreal 1949, Buenos Aires 1954, Tokyo 1960, Cairo 1965 and Mexico City 1970), and technical conferences on wood-based panels (Geneva 1957, Rome 1963). A committee of world experts was brought into being to advise FAO on its programmes in the pulp and paper field, and another intergovernmental committee set up to perform the same function in relation to wood-based panel products.
Meanwhile direct development was promoted, geared to the needs and potentialities of individual countries, first through the United Nations expanded programme of technical assistance and then through the United Nations Development Programme. Of 45 Special Fund projects currently operated by FAO under the latter programme, 23 are mainly concerned with promoting resource and forest industries development.
The FAO committee on wood-based panel products last met in December 1970 for its third session. Its main preoccupation was to review the factors that could affect production development in the medium future. Housing construction is the largest single market for wood-based panels and is lagging behind in many countries. It seems there will be slower growth in the consumption of fibreboard and faster growth in some key areas in the consumption of particle board. Veneer and plywood consumption is uncertain but use of construction plywood will probably increase.
Moves are being made in a number of countries to merge the trade associations representing individual panel industries, which should help promote the continuation of substantial demand. It is noted that overlays for wood-based panels are extending the capabilities, uses and market potential of these products.
The forecasting of demand, and hence of needed pulp supplies and wood resources, was also very much the concern of the FAO Advisory Committee on Pulp and Paper when it met for its twelfth session in Rome in May 1971, and also held a second consultation on world pulp and paper demand, supply and trade.
The background documentation explained the considerable attention being given to forecasting paper demand by correlation with certain key economic indicators. Experience suggested the methods used to be reliable within fairly clearly defined limits, especially where quantities are large, the time horizon is quite long, or where a broad grouping of pulp or paper grades is used. However, using the correlation techniques on the demand for individual grades of pulp and paper has proved much less satisfactory, as almost every grade is used in a wide variety of end-use applications, each of which can be growing or declining quite independently of the others.
Even when an end-use breakdown of consumption is available and an attempt is made to build in differential growth rates for the various commodity groups, correlation techniques on their own can still fail to produce accurate forecasts. To be of use to management in decision making they must be backed by thorough market surveys, because they take no account of the attitudes of end-users and the ways in which these are changing or can be made to change; the extent to which substitution of one grade of pulp or paper for another is likely to occur or can be made to occur; the extent to which other competitive materials such as plastics or synthetic fibres are likely to penetrate into each sub-market; the possible technological changes or developments which could influence demand for pulp and paper in the various commodity groups.
As regards technology, and leaving profitability aside, fibres available to the papermaker today, separately or in combination, permit him, with the exercise of the requisite skills, to meet almost any conceivable end-product specification. The functional value of hardwood pulp is by now well established. Hardwood pulps will be used more and more for the qualities they impart to the end product, irrespective of the price tag that they carry. This will affect the present position under which, in the aggregate, developed countries with 45 percent of the world's stocked forest land area produce 96 percent of the world's wood pulp supply developing countries with 55 percent of the stocked forest land area currently produce only 4 percent of the world's pulp.
A recurring theme at FAO'S first pulp and paper conference at Montreal in 1949 was that "to be economic, wood pulp must be produced where the wood is. Ever since it has been a widely accepted principle in world pulp circles that the movement of raw wood over vast distances entails an added cost factor that few can afford. To the amazement of many experts, this is exactly what is now being done with the bulk transport of wood in the form of chips on no small scale.
The Advisory Committee received interesting information on the development of synthetic paper in Japan. Paper and paperboard in the packaging area continued to face strong competition from plastics. The pulp and paper industry is, of course, following these and similar developments with acute interest and has in fact partly merged and joined forces with plastics producers and processing firms.
There are lessons here to be gleaned for forest policy and thus, once more, it behoves FAO to treat forestry and forest industries together.
Commemorating FAO's twenty-fifth anniversary which occurred last year, Director-General Addeke H. Boerma awarded gold pins to 25 staff members in recognition of their long service. Being honoured here is the editor of Unasylva, Leslie J. Vernell (right). Among the other recipients were René G. Fontaine of the Forestry Department, and Radu C. Fortunescu (now Chief of FAO's Protocol Branch) who produced the first issue of Unasylva in 1947. Leslie Vernell has produced all the issues since. Now, having reached the age of sixty years, he is relinquishing the editorship.
Beginning his service with FAO at Washington D.C. in the Forest Products Branch of the then Forestry Division, he subsequently became Chief of the Programme Coordination Service, and later Assistant to the Director. Graduating in forestry from Oxford University (St. John's College) in 1932, he spent seven years in the Burma Forest Service, then another seven years with the British army in the Far East.
