FAO SECRETARIAT
Effects of changing social and economic demands
This paper results from an exchange of views in a "speculation group of the FAO Forestry Department, which was given the job of preparing a paper to provoke discussion at the February 1971 meeting of the ad hoc Committee on Forestry. It pinpoints changes but does not provide answers.
The group met under the chairmanship of O. Fugalli and included J.E.M. Arnold, T.A. Erfurth, E. Garnum, R.A.O. Huss, K.F.S. King, A.J. Leslie, K.R. Miller, P.R. Persson, J. Prats Llauradó, L.B. Sandahl and A. de Vos. J.E.M. Arnold and A.J. Leslie were largely responsible for the commitment to paper.
The condensed version submitted to the FAO Committee on Forestry aroused much comment but time did not permit a conclusive discussion. The matter is to be raised again at forthcoming session) of FAO's regional forestry commissions and at the first formal session of the Committee on Forestry, expected to be held in March 1972.
"Forest Services" is used as a generic term for the authorities responsible for forestry administration within any country.
In 1970 the United Nations commemorated its twenty-fifth anniversary. But at the special session of the General Assembly held in New York to mark this notable landmark in the history of international relations, celebration of 25 years of relatively peaceful progress in the world was matched by profound concern for the future. The statesmen gathered for the occasion drew attention to the massive changes that had taken place in the past quarter century-and to the inadequacy of many of society's responses to these changes. One foreign minister, in his address, had this to say: "Science in the past quarter century has so far outstripped politics that all our political institutions ... have seemed less and less relevant ... If governments exhibit in the next 25 years the same indifference they have shown in the past, science will either destroy man or enslave him."
Revolutionary is a just description of the changes that have taken place over the last two and a half decades in social, economic, political and technological fields. No country, developed or developing, has been unaffected by them. The only difference between countries in this respect has been in the rate at which they have felt the full impact, and the effectiveness with which they have responded. Future changes, their pace and their effects, are likely to be even more momentous.
It is pertinent at precisely this time, before we enter the last quarter of the twentieth century, to take stock of what has been happening to the forestry sector, and ask ourselves whether the institutions governing the sector are still appropriate and, equally important, appropriate to the situation foreseen for the future. As a starting point, this paper groups current developments into four broad categories: growth in population, economic development, technological change, and social and institutional changes. The apparent implications of these changes for the management of forest resources, for the allocation of resources to and within the forestry sector, and for the production goals for the sector are then examined.
POPULATION GROWTH
During the past quarter century the world's population has grown by more than 50 percent. This massive growth of population has meant in the first place quite simply ever more people needing wood -more than 1000 million more people. Moreover, because the additional population is concentrated in the less developed countries, the wood is needed principally for fuel, simple needs and low-cost building. The burden of supplying the demand has fallen on the local wood resources of these countries.
The growth in population has also meant many more people requiring food. Because there has not been a matching rise in agricultural productivity in most developing countries, this has been reflected in demand for more land on which to grow food. This demand has largely had to be met at the expense of the area of land under forest. Yet, at the same time, more land under agriculture or the use of high-yielding varieties of crops has meant a greater demand for water, and for controlled supplies of water, which has put a growing premium in some parts of the world on preserving or reestablishing forest cover because of the forest's role as a water storage and control medium.
A final point that needs to be made is that there is no end in sight to rapid rates of growth in the populations of most developing countries. Even if birth rates were immediately to start falling significantly, the structures of these populations, heavily weighted to the younger age classes, are such that populations are certain to grow vigorously for decades to come. In fact, it is foreseen that the world's population will grow in size by a further 1000 million in as short a time as the next 15 years. So the effects on the forestry sector will be further accentuated in the years ahead. In short, in many developing countries forestry will for some time have to live with shifting cultivation and its variants and accept further alienation of forest land to permanent agriculture.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The past quarter century has also been marked by a sustained growth in the world's economic activities, which is likely to continue. Again this has led to large increases in consumption of wood products, but not of all wood products. In the more advanced countries, where average real incomes per caput have more than doubled over the period, economic development has meant a static or declining demand for the simpler wood products-fuelwood, wood for use in the round, and to a lesser extent sawnwood. This of course is not new, it is the long-term evolutionary change. For 40 or 50 years, in two of the heaviest consuming regions, Europe and the United States, decline in some uses and growth in other uses roughly balanced each other, so that total wood use remained almost unchanged.
Now aggregate wood consumption has begun to move steadily up. By 1985, the world will probably require at least twice as much wood for industrial processing as it used in 1970; and most of this additional volume will be needed in the developed countries.
This is changing the wood supply situation. Pressures on domestic and exportable wood supplies have steadily tightened through much of the north temperate zone. This in turn has increased the importance of trade, and helped expand the use in the temperate areas of hardwood sawnwood, veneer and plywood from the tropics. It can already be foreseen that the tropics and subtropics will also become important suppliers of certain kinds of wood fibre to the north temperate zone.
The change in the use pattern of products as economies change and develop has also brought with it changes in the types and sizes of wood required. With more of the wood going to pulp and board manufacture, a greater proportion of wood used is of small sizes, more of the supply is coming from residues, etc.
There have also been important changes of a less direct nature. The rise in per caput incomes has been associated with rising labour costs, and this has been heavily felt in the forestry sector, where so many activities are basically labour-intensive. Moreover, the fact that there have been much larger rises in labour costs in the developed than in the developing countries has contributed toward a shift in the global supply pattern of some forest products, notably hardwood plywood.
Another change has been the progressive urbanization of populations. This itself reflects the growing share of manufacturing and services- and the declining share of agriculture - in economies as they develop: in other words, the shift toward activities dependent on concentration of labour and/or consumers. In the more advanced countries, this has reached the point where the absolute, as well as the proportionate, size of rural populations is declining - often quite rapidly. The result has often been declining availability, besides the rising cost, of labour for forest operations.
In the developed countries, where urbanization has recently been accompanied by higher incomes, greater leisure time and improved means of personal transportation, there has been a rapid increase in the real demand for outdoor recreation facilities, leading to forest areas being set aside partly or wholly for this purpose. The same forces underlie the fast growth in tourism, which has put new economic values upon wildlife and wildland areas. Yet another facet of urbanization is that the concentration of population in urban centres has also put more premium on supplies of usable water, and hence added to the importance placed on water. shed management.¹
(¹It has equally added impetus to the quest for cheap large-scale methods of producing desalinated water from the sea - a source of water of much greater potential than increased use of forested areas to this end.)
TECHNOLOGY
In the broadest sense, technological development cannot be separated from economic development. Growth in per caput income can be accomplished only through rising productivity per head. This ultimately can only be achieved through continuous technical progress. Furthermore, if economic growth is to be sustained, the pace of technological change must be quicker. This last point by itself is clearly of significance to a commodity such as wood or wood fibre, which has so long a production period.
In addition, there are many individual technological changes which have had specific impacts upon the sector. Within the forests, more precise methods of surveying and appraising the forest resource have allowed a greater degree of what is available to be used with confidence: there is less need to operate on the basis of keeping a good margin in reserve in case of assessment errors.
Transportation developments have made more of the world's forests accessible. Improved transport systems for end products have contributed to a shift in the location of production units, in part a shift on an international scale. Other factors have been the economies of large-scale production and of integration within and among producing units, so that in all forest industries there has been a strong trend toward larger production units, often in the form of industrial complexes manufacturing a range of products. Sites for such large units are increasingly difficult to find in many parts of the world.
Improvements in wood and fibre processing have extended the range of species, qualities and sizes that can be used industrially, thus broadening the base of the industries in question; improved the quality of some products; lowered the cost of production of others; developed new products, such as particle board; and extended the range of uses for wood-based products, for example in packaging. The fact that it has been the processes which reconstitute wood that have proved more flexible, more adaptable and more readily improvable has contributed to the shift in their favour within the overall utilizations of wood and wood products.
At the same time, technological developments outside the sector have produced new or improved substitutes for wood or wood fibre, such as plastics in packaging and in certain printing uses. Wood-using industries have not in fact been slow to grasp this trend. The impact of technology on forestry as a producer of raw materials is in the longer run likely to be more fundamental than individual product or use advances in favour of or against wood. Technology is now advancing to the stage where its application can transcend the physical limitations of the resource base. As the Secretary-General of the United Nations has said: "The truth, the central stupendous truth about developed countries today is that they can have - in anything but the shortest run - the kind and scale of resources they decide to have... It is no longer resources that limit decisions. It is the decision that makes the resources."
Once the restraints of the concept of a limited physical stock of natural resources available to the world recede, the world is likely to become more discriminating about which of these resources to utilize. Raw materials available in concentrated form, such as mineral resources and the byproducts of the petrochemical industry, could well acquire growing advantages over dispersed raw materials such as wood and wood cellulose-which have the further disadvantage of not being homogeneous, and are subject to disease, pests, fire and other unpredictable, and often uncontrollable, constraints on the quantity or timing of the output.
On the other hand, wood could benefit from being a raw material which as a resource can be renewed, relocated and expanded in extent. A rapid increase in agricultural productivity, arising from technological developments in that sector, has meant in some countries the withdrawal from cultivation of large areas of land which might be suitable for forestry. This opens up the possibilities of major shifts in the location of forestry activity and in forestry productivity. However, it is these same developments in agriculture which are contributing to the exodus of rural labour noted earlier.
The "green revolution"-the development of high yielding varieties of certain agricultural crops, which are being introduced on a large scale in some areas-should permit at least some developing countries to achieve major increases in food output without the need for further alienation of forest land for cultivation.
Agrotechnology applied to tree growing has enabled wood production periods to be reduced, new wood resources to be built up more rapidly, and the properties of the wood or fibre product to be controlled more effectively, thus diminishing the biological and non-homogeneous disadvantages of the material. But at the same time it has introduced more widely into forestry dangers associated with intensive and repeated interference with the environment.
Looking further ahead, one can foresee the possibility of effective weather control, which would further diminish the limitations from which wood suffers as a managed biological raw material.
SOCIAL CHANGE
Finally, there are developments of a social, political and institutional nature, most of which are again closely related to the other changes. Thus the advances in the mechanization of forest operations, which have enabled rising labour costs to be contained in most parts of the world, have sometimes done so at the expense of disruption of the way of life of communities and persons traditionally dependent upon forest work.
At the same time, man's rising social and material aspirations, which accompany improved opportunities and incomes, make people increasingly reluctant to engage in the relatively arduous employment that forest operations entail.
Another change in attitudes is the increasing recognition that forest and associated lands provide attractive environments for relaxation and recreation: as contrasted with the concept at earlier stages of development of the forest as hostile, a barrier to colonization, the harbourer of enemies, and so forth. Related to this is the present serious concern with the quality of the human environment - including concern to preserve the aesthetic aspects of the forest; concern for its protective role; and concern about the side effects that might result from man's intensified intervention in the forest. For these and other reasons, there is a trend toward greater public control over land use, restricting the ways in which forest land may be utilized.
Environmental considerations are likely to have an important effect on the future competitive position of wood, wood industries and wood products. There is, for example, certain to be increasing pressure to reduce and eventually eliminate such pollution as is caused by the pulp and paper industry. The cost would be passed on to the pulp and paper products. But the same pressure will apply to the petrochemical and plastics industries.
There will also be increasing pressure to prevent the sort of pollution and industrial waste which result from the accumulation of used packaging. Paper packaging, which can be much more readily recycled and more quickly and easily destroyed or broken down than plastics, tin or glass, could possibly benefit relatively from this particular development.
The postwar concern with social development, as distinct from the prewar concern with economic stability, has also had an impact on the forest sector; witness the growing pressures for land reform in Latin America. The acceptance in virtually all countries that planning is a necessary tool toward economic and social betterment has itself meant that the sector is increasingly subjected to the test of new criteria, in particular economic criteria.
Finally, the attainment of political independence during this last quarter century for an immense part of the world's peoples is profoundly important. Here it will suffice just to mention the subsequent striving after economic independence. Well to the forefront is a determination to break away from the role of supplier of raw materials and receiver of finished goods-a movement which clearly carries many implications for the forest sector.
What has been said until now is inevitably far from comprehensive. Nevertheless, it is enough to show that the conditions under which forestry must be operated have changed drastically during the lifetime of FAO, and will change further in the future. The only constant factor is, in fact, change. Though it is not easy to draw a clear-cut picture of the implications of so many and such diverse changes, there are certain points that stand out.
Society will need more wood, and also different kinds of wood. The costs of opening up more remote forest areas will rise and labour will be scarcer. But improvements in processing technology will permit a wider range of the species, sizes and qualities that are more readily available to help meet the growing demand. Improvements in agrotechnology will permit higher yields in shorter time and improved wood and wood fibre qualities. More land will become available for forestry in the developed countries, where most of the additional wood will be required. However, the most productive and less costly areas for wood and wood fibre production are in the tropics and subtropics.
In developed countries, a greater demand for the non-wood services of the forest or for environmental forestry may mean lower average wood yields from the total forest areas, as an increasing part of this area is deliberately shifted from solely wood production either to multiple use or wholly to, for example, recreational use.
The core of the challenge to the planners of forest services or industries is that they are thus being called upon to produce much more wood, without a significant increase in cost, and at the same time make provision for greater and diversifying demands on the nonwood services of forests.
The successive meetings of FAO'S Regional Forestry Commissions have revealed some of the awareness that forest services have shown to this period of major changes. Many countries have recognized that past declarations of forest policy were outmoded, and have set in motion the machinery to initiate policy revision. Structural changes have been introduced, sometimes almost desperately, it seems.
It is more than forest policies that usually need revision. Some of the recent changes have altered the very framework within which the foundations of forest policy and practices were laid. The basic principles that, to a large extent, still underlie most forest policy formulation and reformulation emerged at a time when wood was vital to the economy, because there was no substitute for wood in certain key uses, and in a part of the world where growth rates were low and forests could only be regenerated or restored over long periods of time. Hence the pressures to legally set aside a certain part of the country for productive forestry, and to reserve these areas for forest use in perpetuity. Similarly, the concept of sustained yield reflected a period when it could be confidently assumed that a stable flow of forest products would be required in perpetuity, within a framework of land scarcity and a closed economy. Thirdly, they emerged at a time when wood production was clearly the paramount function of the forest.
These conditions have substantially altered. Besides, their relevance in developing countries is limited in an important respect. Modern forestry practices evolved in Europe at a time when agriculture had already extended over most of the land with agricultural potential. In other words, they were related to a fairly stable land-use pattern and to areas that could rationally be devoted to the growing of wood. But this is not so for much of the less developed parts of the world. Legal reservation of forest areas in these countries often takes place, if it takes place at all, at a time when natural forests still cover much land of high agricultural potential. Where the areas set aside for wood production are thus determined largely through what has been termed "historical accident," the energy of forest services becomes directed to perpetuating and improving forest management on areas which could in due course be better employed for, and needed for, agriculture. This is likely to result in neglect of the problems of producing wood on the areas which should unequivocally be devoted to forestry.
None of these findings is new-they have all been identified and documented many times. Nevertheless, forest services have generally been either reluctant to appreciate their implications or slow to respond to them. Changes have too often been made only as a matter of expediency and then have proved to be too little or too late.
Even where changes have been of direct consequence to the principal traditional responsibility of foresters, the production of wood and wood fibre, there has often been a lag in the response to change. Possibly because wood is a producer good and changes in the final consumers' demands filter back to the producer (the forest service in the case of state forests) only indirectly and in modified form, it appears that it has often taken unduly long for the magnitude and nature of the changes to be appreciated, and for their permanent rather than temporary nature to be understood. Hence an even more tardy adjustment of forest management and policies to changed demands and to technological and economic production possibilities.
But it is in those parts of the world where the demands of society upon the forest sector increasingly encompass more than wood production that forest services seem signally to have fallen short in their responses. A case in point is the rising demand for recreational use of the forests, which in some areas has become more important than wood production.
It has been said that fundamental differences in attitude must be accommodated in dealing at the same time with timber production and the provision of recreational experiences: the forester must make a psychological adjustment to accept recreation as a respectable use of the forest, commensurate with provision of physical goods such as wood, water and forage. A mental adjustment is also required, it has been argued, in dealing with a consumer service such as recreation, and hence directly with the consuming public, as distinct from a producer good such as wood. Another adjustment difficulty is the change in the role of time: the "production" of recreation is practically instantaneous, so that the forester has to accommodate two different value scales of time when also dealing with the long production periods of wood.
These arguments may be spurious. Moreover, the importance of the shift in the balance between recreational use of the forests and associated lands and their use for production of wood, water and forage should not be exaggerated. Only some parts of the world at present have the necessary affluence and leisure time to use the forests for recreation, especially wildlife observation as a form of tourism. Moreover, there are many other ways to use increased leisure time and disposable cash income. The growth in recreational use of the forests may not then necessarily continue at its present rapid rate. Even if it does, much of it can be absorbed through multiple use management of forest lands. What must not be ignored, however, is that if forest services are to be successful in providing recreational and other nonwood services as well as wood, when and where the demand for these services does arise, they will require different skills, training, working tools and administrative attitudes and practices than are needed just for the production of wood.
The first thing that is needed is for the organization of forestry to be modernized in such a way that it is sensitive to trends in the social importance of its products and services, so that policies and methods can be adjusted in anticipation of changes. The sector needs flexible managers and technical specialists who can gauge the future extent and direction of social and economic changes, work out the changes needed in current management practices, and introduce the appropriate measures for making a smooth and timely transition. The additional expertise may most rationally be acquired by bringing into forestry administration and management people trained in the appropriate disciplines. This is increasingly happening. But even then, the appropriate responses to change are likely to be possible only if the professional foresters are able to have, and are interested in having, continuing education to keep them abreast of the changing context within which they have to practice their profession, and if there is systematic updating of the content and methods of forestry education. The present emphasis in many countries on the physical and biological sciences as the basic elements of forestry education seems inadequate for what is needed.
In order to be able to analyse in each country the present and probable future relative importance of all the production possibilities, better methodologies will have to be developed for the economic evaluation of the protective and social benefits and the cultural and aesthetic values of forestry, as well as for forecasting future demands for these "products. " This has been said many times. It will also become progressively more important to be able to forecast changes, qualitative as well as quantitative, in the demand for wood. This lays emphasis on improving the economic statistical data frame for the sector, and requires more penetrating analysis of demand-shifting relationships and interrelationships.
Though improved forward appraisal will go far in improving forest managers' possibilities for responding adequately to change, it can never approach perfect prevision. Increasing attention must therefore be given to maintaining flexibility in the management options, to permit response to unforeseen change. For example, there will be a premium on those alternatives which allow the most freedom for shifts in land and resource use that are economically feasible over fairly short time spans. The value of quick-growing species which permit land-use options to be changed without undue economic sacrifice will thus become more important.
Forest managers may need to cushion the impact of change further by concentrating wood production forestry where it can be deduced that the demand for the other "products" of the forest lands will be less intensive, or where their supply is not critical.
If bigger demand for wood products has to be met in this way from a smaller area, it will heighten pressures to improve productivity and cost effectiveness. As the greater part of the delivered cost of industrial wood is nearly everywhere accounted for by logging and transport expenses, attention must concentrate on cost reductions at this stage of the production process, including changes in silvicultural systems. The means may take the form not only of increased and improved mechanization and automation but also of better educated personnel, cooperatives, and so on.
But reductions in the cost of wood cannot afford to be gained at the expense of staff welfare and health.
To do all these things is not going to be easy. Many of them are to some degree incompatible with one another. Many involve drastic departures from attitudes and methods that have become traditional. But forestry is going to be different whether forest services like it or not. They may therefore just as well do something constructive about it. The main obstacles they will have to overcome are institutional myopia and inertia. Sometimes the only way to get around these obstacles is to create new institutions and let the old ones wither away. This is already happening in forestry. New organizational arrangements are being devised to take care of, for example, environmental forestry.
It is no use complaining that forestry is being left out of its rightful field. If it is, it is for very good reasons-people believe that forestry is concerned with other matters and is out of touch with their special needs. The only way not to get left out is to get back into touch; and the only ones who can do that are the foresters.
Recognizing the need for change is one problem, doing something about it is another. The institutional environment differs so much from country to country that it is hard to discern any generalized approach. One of the first things would seem to be to mount an imaginative and aggressive public relations campaign in order to educate public authorities and public opinion at large as to:
(a) the benefits and values of forestry;
(b) the government action needed to preserve and enhance these benefits and values; and
(c) the appropriate behaviour of the individuals who come into or near the forest. Perhaps in this respect the professional forestry societies could play a much more active part than they have so far done.
This, however, could only be a holding operation, to gain time in which to plan and introduce the reconstruction of forestry policy, practices and education. How this is done is up to each country in the light of its procedures for effecting administrational reorganization and legislative amendment. Some idea of what the end result should be can come from international comparisons. But there is no universal formula for achieving that result.
