Private lands also suffer from subsidized National Forest logging.
In the Southeast, for example, the subsidies make it difficult for private
landowners to compete in the high-quality mature sawtimber market.
As a result, chip mills, which produce material for wood pulp from trees
of any age and are fed almost exclusively by private lands, have proliferated.
Since private lands are virtually unregulated, the result has been accelerating
forest destruction, degrading not only water quality, wildlife habitat,
and threatened and endangered species, but also the local forest-dependent
economy. Softwoods throughout the region have been overcut and both
the industry and the Forest Service predict that removal of hardwoods will
exceed growth within the decade.
The wood chipping industry encourages massive in
industrial-scale clearcutting on increasingly shorter rotations unlike
the solid wood sector which typically uses select cutting on long rotations.
Since they cannot compete with the subsidized timber from public land,
the solid wood producers are turning to wood chipping. They are chipping
the small-diameter trees that would become the sawtimber of tomorrow, if
left to grow for another 30 years. Employment is also affected.
Studies show the best potential for job growth within the forest products
industry lies with solid wood manufacturing, which is more labor intensive
than wood chipping. If the National Forests no longer sold timber,
the restricted supply would increase the value of sawtimber.
Private landholders would then have the economic incentives to use
selection management on long rotations to produce solid wood products.
The excessive and unsustainable wood chipping would cease.