World-Wide Forests Expanding, Aided by High-Yield Farming
In the November 16th 2006 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international research team says 22 of the 50 most forested world countries have been gaining forest since 1990, reversing the trend of forest decline often associated with modern societies and rising populations.
The countries with growing forest assets include the United States, Canada, much of Europe, and European Russia, China and India. This growth has been enabled by: 1) high-yield farms, which grow more food per acre on the best-quality land and leave marginal land to trees; 2) more high-yield tree plantations with faster-growing trees; 3) more wood imports from the world’s faster-growing warm-climate forests; and 4) the continuing rural-urban migration that substitutes kerosene for firewood in Third World cooking and heating.
Unfortunately, Indonesia, Nigeria and the Philippines report declining forest assets while Myanmar reports nothing at all.
In America, a huge surge of timber harvest and farming expansion between 1850 and 1910 denuded 190 million acres of forest, says co-author Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University. Since then, however, high-yield crops and livestock have permitted forests to re-grow in New England, West Virginia, the Ozarks and other marginal farming areas. U.S. corn yields have soared from 25 bushels per acre in 1860 to more than 140 bushels today, while meat and milk production per acre has doubled just since 1970. French forest cover expanded from about 7 percent to 25 percent over the last century as its wheat yields surged from less than 2 tons per hectare in 1950 to more than 7 tons per hectare with fertilizer, better seeds, and fungicides.
Co-author Paul Waggoner, of the University of Connecticut, says his state’s forests expanded from 29 percent of the land area in 1860 to 60 percent in 2002. Worldwide, tree plantations already supply 33 percent of the industrial wood, notes the research team. The researchers say expanded tree plantations are expected to lower the percentage of wood cut from natural forests from 67 percent today to 25 percent by 2050. Waggoner notes that more of today’s U.S. wood harvest is coming from Southern forests that can grow twice as fast as northern ones, and from tree plantations where species selection, fertilizer and weed suppression hasten tree growth.
In Asia, say the researchers, 792,000 hectares of forest were cleared between 1990 and 2000—but reforestation programs in China and India added more than 1 million hectares of forests between 2000 and 2005. There are good reasons to believe the big Asian countries have now gotten rich enough to value trees and forests.
In the Caribbean, forests are recovering in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but Haiti has been virtually deforested by poverty and poor governance.
One of the biggest threats to world forests today, unfortunately, is the First World’s fear of global warming. Third World countries that have been over-cutting their forests for firewood are now being discouraged from substituting fossil fuels like kerosene and fuel oil for tree-cutting.
The current surge of interest in biofuels is also threatening forests in the U.S., France, and Malaysia. America’s mandate for 7.5 billion gallons of biofuels by 2012 could trigger the clearing of millions of acres of heartland forests to expand corn production for ethanol. Unfortunately, corn ethanol produces only a net 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre per year, so even that deforestation wouldn’t make much of a dent in the annual U.S. demand for 135 billion gallons of gasoline.
