• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The export uses (in addition to domestic consumption) to which timber logged from Australia’s remnant forests is being put are remarkable. Of forest product exports, half are not in the form of logs or finished materials but are turned into wood chips and sent mostly to Japan, where they are used to produce paper and its products and make up one-quarter of the material in Japanese paper. While the price that Japan pays to Australia for those wood chips has dropped to $7 per ton, the resulting paper sells in Japan for $1,000 per ton, so that almost all of the value added to the timber after it is cut accrues to Japan rather than to Australia. At the same time as it exports wood chips, Australia imports nearly three times more forest products than it exports, with more than half of those imports being in the form of paper and paperboard products.

Thus, the Australian forest products trade involves a double irony. On the one hand, Australia, one of the First World countries with the least forest, is still logging those shrinking forests to export their products to Japan, the First World country with the highest percentage of its land under forest (74%) and with that percentage still growing. Second, Australia’s forest products trade in effect consists of exporting raw material at a low price, to be converted in another country into finished material at a high price and with high added value, and then importing finished materials. One expects to encounter that particular type of asymmetry not in the trade relations between two First World countries, but instead when an economically backward, non-industrialized Third World colony unsophisticated at negotiations deals with a First World country sophisticated at exploiting Third World countries, buying their raw materials cheaply, adding value to the materials at home, and exporting expensive manufactured goods to the colony. (Japan’s major exports to Australia include cars, telecommunications equipment, and computing equipment, while coal and minerals are Australia’s other major exports to Japan.) That is, it would appear that Australia is squandering a valuable resource and receiving little money for it.

The continued logging of old-growth forests is giving rise to one of the most passionate environmental debates in Australia today. Most of the logging and the fiercest debate are going on in the state of Tasmania, where Tasmania Mountain Ash, at up to 305 feet tall some of the world’s tallest remaining trees outside of California, are now being logged faster than ever. Both of Australia’s major political parties, at both the state and federal levels, favor continued logging of Tasmanian old-growth forests. A possible reason is suggested by the fact that, after the National Party announced its strong support for Tasmanian logging in 1995, it became known that the party’s three biggest financial contributors were logging companies.

In addition to mining its old-growth forests, Australia has also planted agroforestry plantations, both of native and of non-native tree species. For all the reasons mentioned previously—low soil nutrient levels, low and unpredictable rainfall, and resulting low growth rates of trees—agroforestry is much less profitable and faces higher costs in Australia than in 12 out of the 13 countries that are among its principal competitors. Even Australia’s most valuable commercially surviving timber tree species, the Tasmanian Blue Gum, grows faster and more profitably in overseas plantations where it has been planted (in Brazil, Chile, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Vietnam) than in Tasmania itself.

The mining of Australia’s marine fisheries resembles that of its forests. Basically, Australia’s tall trees and lush grass deceived the first European settlers into overrating Australia’s potential for food production on land: in technical terms used by ecologists, the land supported large standing crops but low productivity. The same is true of Australia’s oceans, whose productivity is low because it depends on nutrient runoff from