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Politics

Greens at logger heads over plantations

Phil Northeast
12 Feb 2008

Disagreement amongst Greens spokespersons and contradictions of Wilderness Society  surfaced in recent statements opposing the establishment of sustainable forestry without the felling of old growth forest. 

A Green Party member of State Parliament, Kim Booth, expressed concerns about the return of existing farmland to trees at a meeting in the remote Upper Natone area of Tasmania’s Northwest Coast.

“More and more prime family farms are going under to tree plantations,” Booth told the Mercury.  
This highlights the continuing decline in the rural communities, as young people leave small isolated farms and head to larger towns and cities.

Small-scale Tasmania vegetable farmers are having difficulty in competing on price with processed products imported from Asia. This resulted in a farmer’s campaign for country of origin labelling of processed vegetables sold in Australia.

The closure of Simplot vegetable processing plants in Tasmania is another indication of the difficulties facing farmers.

Tree farm in Northern Tasmania

One option is to sell the farm, retire and move to a town for aged care and medical facilities. The lack of buyers for uneconomic smallholdings is a problem. Usually the logical buyer is a neighbouring farmer looking to expand the size of their operation to try to remain competitive through improved economies of scale. 

However, with the increasing demand for non-native forest timber, growing trees is now an economic proposition. 

“Premier Lennon should adopt the Greens’ transition forest policy to base the future on plantations,” said Green Senator Dr Bob Brown in June 2005. 

“It is high time the Tasmanian government, Forestry Tasmania and Gunns woke from the self deception that logging wild, beautiful, ancient forests in Tasmania is ‘environmentally sustainable’.”
The Wilderness Society claimed in promoting a book, Forest-Friendly Building Timbers   that, “Plantations are simply tree farms, like wheat fields, which can be regrown with fast-growing timber species. A plantation grows timber at 10 to 40 times the rate of a native forest.” 

"This consumer guide can save forests, because if we can vote with our wallets by only buying plantation or recycled timbers, there's no longer any justification for woodchipping or native forest sawlogging," said Alan Gray, the book’s co-editor.  The Society claim the book is printed on paper made from plantation-grown trees.

Despite Senator Brown and the Wilderness Society promoting the use of only plantation timber, Green MP Kim Booth told the Mercury  “Tree farms threaten the viability of the state’s agricultural sector and are causing enormous anxiety and distress throughout the north of Tasmania.”
If the policies of his fellow Green politicians and the Wilderness society continue the trend away from logging old growth native forest then there will be more tree plantations around Tasmania.