This report presents the reported area of forest and non-forest plantations in 89 (78 tropical and 11 sub-tropical) countries to the year end 1995, with estimated areas under industrial plantations as well as estimated current planting rates. The net area of successfully established forest plantations in each country was calculated by applying an estimated reduction factor. The net areas were then broken down into areas of major plantation species, with particular reference to hardwood species.
The objectives of the study were;
Tropical countries were defined as those countries having more than 50% of their land area between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn while sub-tropical countries were those bordering the tropics.
The following available sources were used:
Responses to questionnaires received by the FAO headquarters
FAO sent questionnaires to all the tropical and sub-tropical countries during 1995 - 1996 for evaluating and updating the information base on the forest plantation resource. About one third of the countries responded to the questionnaire but the data furnished had often the reference year 1990 or another and only in a few cases the requested year 1994/95. Though the questionnaire guideline was comprehensive for evaluating the plantation resource by area broken down into species, age class, location, ownership, objective, future plan as well as actual yield after harvest of plantations, the information furnished by the countries was often incomplete, inconsistent and unreliable.
Personal contacts
FAO Senior Forestry Officer (Plantations) Mr J.B. Ball made personal contact through e-mail, contacts with FAO Regional offices and during visits to Indonesia and Malaysia for collecting reliable data on plantation resource.
Report from Oxford Forestry Institute
FAO signed a Letter of Agreement with Oxford Forestry Institute for a literature search. The institute was requested to focus on a relatively small number of priority countries. The search through CD Rom and internet were found unproductive. Only 7 countries of Africa, 7 countries of Asia and Brazil could be covered. The data presented for the countries studied could neither be standardised nor brought to any specific reference year due to inconsistency in the sources.
Literature search of World Bank sources
FAO also signed an Author’s contract in July 1997 with Mr. John Heerman for searching the literature on forest plantation areas at the World Bank, Washington, D.C. In this search the author extracted the plantation area data of the World Bank projects continued or terminated from 1990 using Implementation and Project Completion Reports mostly by accessing through internet - World Bank home page. The report presented planned plantation area of the Projects and also the planted area where projects had been completed. 12 countries in Africa, 11 countries in Asia and Pacific and Brazil had been covered. The report gave some idea about the development of plantations in these countries.
In addition to the above sources available at the time of starting this study, the consultant made an intensive search in the FAO Forestry library and the documentation section of the National Forestry Action Programme (NFAP) support unit. The Country Report presented to the Regional Forestry Commission sessions of FAO during 1992/93 and 1995/96 were found the most useful, especially for South American and African countries. Reports collected from the NFAP support unit were mainly background studies in the preparation of Master Plan and NFAP of the countries, some of which carry information on the plantation resource. The FAO Statistics library proved a good source for plantation area data of non-forest species.
Further, the consultant made personal contacts through e-mail in China, ITTO (The International Tropical Timber Organization) and Costa Rica and met a large number of country delegates from forest services during two important world conferences held in this period: the First session of the Conference of the Parties on Convention to Combat Desertification from 29 September to 10 October 1997 in Rome, Italy and the XI World Forestry Congress from 13-22 October in Antalya, Turkey. Discussions with the delegates were particularly useful for area information at species level.
All available information mentioned in the above sources was pooled together for each country and reviewed in a systematic manner to derive consistent figures. Country figures were added to derive regional and global totals.
The reported area referred to plantation areas provided either by government, industry, or other outside sources. Normally this meant that the accumulated planted area (which may be different from actual area existing) was taken from the sources mentioned above. In many cases where a country’s total plantation area by the year 1995 was not available, it was estimated using the plantation establishment rate during the previous years. In a few cases where no new information was available, plantation data for the reference year 1990 available in FAO Forestry Paper 128 (FAO 1995) was treated as the base line data and projected to 1995. Consistency of the data was given high priority.
Plantations for the supply of roundwood for sawtimber, veneer and pulp were classified as “industrial plantations” in this study. Sometimes they were identified from the source, but often the area had to be inferred on the basis of species composition, since in many instances no indication of purpose was given. Areas of teak (Tectona grandis), mahogany, (Swietenia spp. and Terminalia spp.) and Gmelina arborea for example were classified as industrial plantations. The areas of eucalypts (Eucalyptus spp.) were subject to doubts over their end use; this could have been for pulpwood but frequently it was for fuelwood, and the reader is advised to interpret the results with caution, referring to individual country data in specific cases. Conversely, the areas of some species were excluded, since it was known that they did not supply the products mentioned above; examples of this were gum arabic plantations (Acacia senegal) or wattle plantations (Acacia mearnsii) which was used for tanbark.
Estimation of the net forest plantation area, (the actual area of the stocked plantations excluding failed, harvested or doubly counted plantations) was done by applying a reduction factor (derived from 58 plantation surveys in 18 countries in the 1980s) to reported gross areas of forest plantations. In most of the cases the regional reduction factors estimated in FAO Forestry Paper 128 (FAO 1995) were used, except for the countries where net area was estimated based on a reliable national inventory of forest plantations (see Appendix 1). The average reduction factors counted from regional and countrywise values were: tropical Africa 0.76, tropical Asia-Pacific 0.66 and tropical America 0.85. In all sub-tropical countries reduction factor was assumed 1.0. It was not possible to estimate the net areas of industrial and non-industrial plantations separately, as the results of plantation inventories often did not differentiate between these two. Industrial plantations were, however, expected to be better managed and had higher success rates than non-industrial plantations.
The reported plantation area figures of the sub-tropical countries - Australia, China and Tunisia were based on plantation inventories done in the recent past, hence no reduction factor was applied. Besides Chile and South Africa, plantation area figures of the remaining 6 sub-tropical countries (Algeria, Argentina, Lesotho, Morocco, Swaziland and Uruguay) were also assumed to be reliable, and reported areas were accepted as net areas of these 8 countries.
The annual average plantation area in recent years (1991 - 1995) was assumed as annual plantation rate. For countries where there was no information, plantation rates from 1981 - 1990 were used.
Estimation of area at the species level was found the most difficult in the absence of reliable and accurate data. Only a few countries mentioned the plantation area of the main species, grouping other species under the heading “others” or “other broadleaves” or “other conifers”. Mostly countries indicated names of the species or species group used in the plantations. The tropical forest plantation resource assessment of 1990 (FAO 1995) used consultant/mission reports and plantation inventory reports as a supplement for estimating area under selected species. The data of the present study has been supplemented in some instances by the species composition mentioned in the previous assessment and by personal communication during meetings by the consultant. The countries that reported the breakdown of the total area by species sometimes gave area and sometimes percentage of the total. In this report species compilation was standardised as percentages and then applied to the total net area. Given the availability of information and the focus of the present study on hardwood plantations, species-wise areas were estimated according to the following groups:
Hardwood species (HW)
Softwood species (SW)
Since “Other HW” group represented a large number of species but only a few of which were planted in any specific country, a separate table was constructed and presented in the third chapter indicating the main species of this group in selected countries.
Responsibility for reporting on rubber (Hevea brasiliensis), oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) or coconut (Cocos nucifera), did not traditionally lie within the forestry sector but, since these species have made significant contributions to industrial wood or fibre supply, data on these plantation areas was included in this report. The sources of information were national and international yearbooks or bulletins concerned with each non-forest plantation species.
Appendix 2 presents country figures, arranged in an alphabetical order in a standard tabular form consisting of reported gross area, area under industrial plantation, estimated net area, net areas under major species and annual rate of planting. Species-wise net areas and their percentage in country’s total plantation area have been tabulated in Appendix 3. The plantation areas of non-forest species are listed by country and region in Appendix 4.
Sources of the figures were arranged country-wise in an alphabetical order in the reference section and not quoted with figures. The report of the countries without any reference is based on projection of 1990 figure mentioned in FAO Forestry Paper 128 (FAO 1995). Some references common to many countries were grouped under the heading “miscellaneous”.
Chapter 2 synthesizes the forest plantation data while chapter 3 describes the distribution of the net area of main hardwood species in different regions and countries.
