Henri Chauvin
HENRI CHAUVIN, Chief of the FAO Forestry Department's Logging and Transport Branch, spent many years in logging operations in West Africa and the Amazon.
Factors conditioning methods and costs
Forest harvesting is often considered - rather simplistically - as being essentially a matter of first moving heavy, cumbersome logs across rough, often steep terrains and then transporting them long distances by road, railway or waterway. While the transport side of logging does in fact play an important and sometimes predominant role, anyone interested in this field should not overlook all the other operations, which link the standing tree in the forest to the logs piled up in the mill yard, ready to be processed.
These operations - from preliminary survey and inventory to delivery to user and processing factories of logs already hewn, measured, barked and often treated for their preservation - are carried out in widely varying methods and techniques. They range from the simplest, involving a high number of workers who resort to machines for only the heaviest work, to the most sophisticated and highly mechanized processes. However, a satisfactory run of this sequence of operations, which takes into account, beyond economic criteria, also social and biological requirements, clearly depends on many factors.
Taken individually or as a whole these factors may be favourable, indifferent, somewhat limiting, constraining, or at times impossible to handle. Therefore, it is important to know from the start what they are, to analyse them and to determine to what extent they may obstruct the utilization of the forest or influence or determine the choice of techniques, and methods as well as the cost of the various logging operations. Without dwelling on too many details, a few typical examples will give some idea of the complexity and the magnitude of the problem.
Tropical moist forests are usually situated in underpopulated, often inaccessible regions, far away from cities. In most cases they contain a wide variety of species and many of these trees are capable of reaching very large dimensions. At the same time, the harvestable volume per hectare is generally comparatively low, given present harvesting methods. Climatic conditions may be extreme.
Other elements come into play, besides these, and they too are important in the process of developing the forest. The main ones are:
· Limited knowledge about the composition of the forest, and therefore about its productive capacity.· A shortage or complete lack of infrastructure and equipment.
The harvesting of tropical moist forest therefore requires a lot of preliminary work: survey and inventory work, the construction of roads for access and extraction, the establishment of camps, management of waterways, and possibly the construction of railways and port facilities. In principle this work is the responsibility of the public authorities but it must often be undertaken, at least in part, by the logger, be he in the public or private sector. Subsequently, as operations get under way, the construction of roads, bridges and tracks continues to play an essential role. This, therefore, is an essential feature in the harvesting of tropical forests: the logger must also be a public works contractor.
Logging in tropical forests is more difficult than in other areas. It is obvious that the various factors determine the method or techniques chosen, and that this choice in turn will have a direct influence on costs. Great attention must be paid to the effects of interaction even when they are hard to identify and assess.
In order to analyse the different factors which influence operations and costs, it will be useful to assemble them into various groups.
These comprise conditions ranging from the geographical situation of the forest to the composition of the stands, which are practically unchangeable but which may have a decisive effect on logging operations. They may be listed as follows:
· Location and distance from forest processing and utilization centres.· Topography and geology, including terrain, network or waterways, nature of the soil and conditions of the ground.
· Climate and influence of the temperature, effect of solar radiation and, in particular, the rainfall and its distribution.
· The stands and their composition, distribution of species, diameter and height of the trees, their shape, density of the forest, the standing volume per surface unit, the nature of the undergrowth.
These are factors stemming from institutions, they are the result of human options and therefore to some extent modifiable. They are, however, influenced by the social and economic conditions of the region and of the country itself.
In turn, they affect social factors - such as education, vocational training, social benefits, and economic factors - such as taxes, custom duties, infrastructure, currency, and more. These are highly sensitive questions, which may be easily understood but require very delicate handling.
Logging is one of those activities in which the more primary the work level the greater the number of workers needed. Since tropical forests are located in sparsely populated regions, this represents a problem. In addition to the availability of manpower, there are related problems, such as the educational and training level of the working forest population, providing them with living quarters, creating sanitary conditions at logging camps, obtaining the right kinds of food and, finally, the basic question of motivation of the work force. Other important factors are the system of payment, accident protection and social benefits. In regions where underemployment exists, logging can be planned along labour intensive lines, to absorb and benefit excess manpower.
All these factors should be borne in mind in deciding upon logging methods and techniques and they will, of course, have a considerable effect on costs.
There are two categories of economic factors which depend upon whether they affect production costs or the use of the products.
In the first category are such items as the purchase price of equipment and material, maintenance and operating costs (import duty, price of fuel and spare parts), the cost of investments, manpower (wages, social advantages, accommodation, etc.), productivity and the performance of equipment and of manual workers under local conditions and the distances involved.
The second category includes local, regional and international market conditions for tropical timbers, freight and marketing costs, and the development of forest utilization.
Clearly, all these factors should be viewed against the backdrop of the economic conditions of the region and the country, but also of the state of the world economy.
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A great number of factors therefore affect harvesting in tropical forests and may lead to the selection or rejection of specific methods and techniques.
In the first place, the methods, although they vary widely, fall into two categories:
- highly mechanized methods
- labour intensive methods
Between these two extremes are all the intermediate methods according to the degree of mechanization of each of the operations.
What operations have to be carried out in order to bring the tree from the forest to the factory or to the port? To what extent can they be mechanized and what are the factors among those mentioned which influence organization and cost of the product?
Tropical forest logging requires certain kinds of information about the forest, such as topography, species composition, the volume of wood available, and possibilities for access and extract on. Such knowledge is essential, in the first place to decide whether or not to harvest and then for planning the operations.
Modern techniques such as aerial photography and mapping have greatly facilitated these surveys but much of the work still has to be done in the field, on the ground and it is heavy work requiring great skill. Modern transport including helicopters and four-wheel-drive vehicles have also improved conditions but they are expensive and their use weighs heavily on the total cost of operations. Moreover, such means can only be used once an infrastructure has been developed.
The cost of tropical logging can vary greatly according to the amount of information and the degree of accuracy required, and whether this was obtained through systematic investigation or based on sampling.
Experience also shows variations in costs ranging from 15 to 20 percent depending on whether the investigation is carried out on easy or on difficult ground, from 25 to 35 percent depending on whether operations are simplified or more complete, and from 200 to 300 percent depending on whether a rich or a poor forest is involved. The area surveyed affects total logging costs comparatively little, but the volume logged per ha has a great influence on the costs. The percentage is low, however, compared with the total outlay. Finally, it should be pointed out that the organization of the work and the means available may affect costs substantially, e.g., expenses for air support, draftsman and vehicles.
As a general rule, it should be remembered that:
(a)
successful logging operations and a good network of roads and trails depend essentially on a good survey.
(b) the smaller the volume logged per hectare, the more elaborate and complete must be the survey.
(c) the more difficult the ground, the more manpower and man-days are required.
(d) the more details are required on the topography and composition of the forest, the smaller the area surveyed by one team.
(e) Limited surveys (e.g., one which only covers a pertinent 10 percent of the area) may be adequate and result in substantial savings in operations costs.
Another point is worth remembering. The trend among tropical forest countries is towards regulations requiring concessionnaires or logging permit holders to make periodic submissions of their harvesting plans years in advance of actual operations. These submissions must also indicate survey methods used and there is pressure for systematic survey work. These developments point towards substantial increases in survey costs associated with tropical logging.
Once the decision has been made to go ahead with logging operations in a particular tropical forest area another set of decisions has to be made concerning the order of operations and investments. These fall into four steps:
1. Preparatory reconnaissance; a brief general survey.
2. Construction of an access road.
3. Construction of a main camp, which includes:- accommodation for the management personnel and furnishings
- staff accommodations and furnishings.
- community building, i.e. infirmary equipment.
- technical buildings: garage, warehouses, offices and equipment.
- sanitation, water, electricity, generator sets, pumps.
- organization of communications: radio, air strip.4. Building of side camps.
These steps show the complexity of logging on a large scale. The variation in costs of opening up the forest is directly dependent on the number of factors considered: abundance of timber logged per hectare, topography of the land, distance from a public road. They also vary in relation to the volume harvested annually, that is, the size of the enterprise, and to the methods employed.
Intensive mechanization will sometimes entail considerable investment for maintenance of the equipment, the price of which will require sustained production and will not allow for a reduction in the supply. Labour intensive logging will involve problems of accommodation, management, etc.
Estimated costs are comparatively easy to assess, and their variation in line with the different factors can be anticipated.
If the access road constitutes one of the prerequisites, the building of roads and trails for logging purposes should go hand in hand with the development of operations. As a general rule, they should be built sufficiently in advance to allow for their stabilization before utilization (at least one year for main roads).
In principle, the density of the connecting network should be proportional to the wealth of the area, but it also depends on the cost of transport in the region. An optimum balance should be established between off-road transport costs (skidding by crawler or wheel tractors) and on-road costs (lorries, trailers, etc.). The cost of building these roads which must possess special features for servicing different types of logging (seasonal, continuous, etc.) affects also the cost of the skidding trails.
These general principles are tempered by certain considerations based on both experience and theoretical calculations:
(a)
If the exploitable volume per hectare of the forest is low, it will be difficult to fall below a required minimum for penetration (it is estimated that at least three km of roads are required for the harvesting of 1000 ha of forests).
(b) A rough terrain also limits the density since building costs become prohibitive. In this case the number of skidding trails should be increased.
In general and in order of magnitude, a density of four km of roads and eight km of trails for 1000 ha logged in poor forests can reach, exceptionally, eight km of roads and 22 km of trails for the same surface logged in a rich area. One of the decisive factors remains the outlay for these roads. Building costs obviously depend on the nature of the roads according to their purpose or use. They are also conditioned by the following factors: deforestation, earthwork, bridges, culverts and drainage, effect of solar radiation, leveling, surfacing, compacting, etc., the relative importance of which also depends directly on the purpose and conditions of use.
Road maintenance is an important factor because it plays a leading role in transport and extraction of the timber.
The mileage to be kept in repair grows at a faster rate as logging expands. Moreover, the lower the volume logged per hectare the higher the mileage of roads in need of repair. One may therefore pass from 25 km of roads calling for maintenance in the rich forests to 100 km in forests where the volume logged per hectare is low. The cost of maintenance per cubic metre of output may double when ground conditions become difficult. At the same time it may treble when a poor, rather than a rich, forest is involved. These variations accumulate or cancel out to some extent according to circumstances.
Finally, must stress that the cost of maintenance also largely depends on the nature of the ground and available materials, on rainfall, on use of the road, etc.
The yield from these operations varies a great deal according to the technique employed: axe, hand-saw or power-saw. Theoretically, production depends also on the number of trees to be felled per hectare and on the size of the trees. However this production is affected much more by the organization of the work and by local habits.
On the other hand, if we consider operations in relation to logging as a whole and from the cost angle, we see that while the cost per cubic metre of felling and topping does not vary greatly with the number of trees logged per hectare and with the difficult nature of the terrain, the share which they represent in the total production cost per cubic metre of timber increases rapidly with the volume logged per hectare. This share can go from 1.5 percent in a poor forest to 5 or 6 percent in rich stands (about 50 m3 harvestable per hectare, for instance).
Therefore, the importance of these operations should not be underrated in arriving at cost estimates.
Skidding operations represent from 20 to 40 percent of the cost of the wood delivered to the roadside, according to whether the logging is being done on easy terrain in rich forests or on difficult terrain in poor forests. This is obviously a matter of magnitude, but it does convey the importance that has to be given to the factors which influence this operation. We have little information on variations in extraction costs in non-mechanized logging operations. We should, however, note that the use of crawler and wheel tractors, and of winches and cables has become the rule and that skidding by draught animals (elephants, oxen, etc.) is gradually disappearing. Skidding by hand is now practically non-existent.
From information available on skidding by caterpillar or wheel tractor, or by a combination of both techniques, we find that the variations in the volume logged per hectare may influence the cost of the operation, bringing it from 1 (rich forests) to 2.2 (poor forests) per cubic metre. As for the influence of the terrain, we find a variation in operation costs from 1 (easy terrain) to 2.5 (difficult terrain). The combination of the two factors alone, yield and terrain, leads to variations in cost from 1 to 5.
Space does not allow for a more detailed analysis of the influence of other factors in this study, but it should be stressed that skidding is an extremely sensitive operation. It reacts to various factors and it is essential to make a detailed analysis, to decide on the most appropriate methods and techniques and the choice of the most adequate equipment. The manpower factor, and vocational training in particular, will have an appreciable effect on costs.
This is an operation which conditions to some extent the quality of the logs and their utilization, and therefore their selling price. Wherever the cross-cutting is done - at the tree stump, by the trail or roadside - it must be done with the greatest care.
Accordingly, it is necessary to study the conditions under which it can be done. At the tree stump, the vegetation or the unevenness of the terrain make it difficult to carry out the work properly.
While cross-cutting costs are scarcely affected by the volume logged per hectare or by ground conditions, the quality of the output has a strong impact on the selling price of the products. That is why planning, skilled workers and good cadres can play a decisive role.
The cost of this operation varies with the yield per hectare but, above all, with the choice of means, often dictated by the size of the enterprise, the volume handled - and even the size of the trees. Good extension services and the employment of skilled workers and, above all, the optimum use of transport facilities and the cost of the transport itself have a great influence on loading costs.
The organization, the choice of equipment and the costs of road transport depend on many factors. Certain conditions may limit the possibilities of choice: the unavoidable use of public roads and the highway code have a direct effect on the choice of materials, the distances to be covered, the quality of the highways used, the price of equipment, fuel and lubricants, spare tires and servicing are of fundamental importance.
The impact and interaction of this combination of factors may however be appraised and analysed without too much difficulty.
The same holds good when the logs are transported by rail or waterway.
The overhead expenses are as far as possible apportioned and charged to the various operations. This is not always feasible and, to simplify bookkeeping, many of these expenses have to be accounted for locally. It is difficult to say to what extent these expenses are influenced by other factors. They largely depend on the conception of organization and management as applied to logging. They are also influenced by pre-existing socio-economic conditions.
The factors affecting logging prospects in tropical forests are many; therefore, decision-makers can in fact decide only when all possible information on every facet of the operation has been secured. But to assess the weight of these factors and control them whenever possible is not easy, and leaves room for a great deal of uncertainty.
Yet, what is at stake is so important that far more research is needed in this field. Let us hope that this research will help us in the near future to find the best ways to harvest tropical forests.
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