January 20th 2001

Positive climate for forestry

By Hugh Scanlan

In terms of planting levels, forestry has experienced an extremely lean period over the past few years, with only around half the national target being achieved.

In addition, the environmental issue, in its broadest sense, seemed to throw a cloud over the sector, sapping its energy to drive forward.

This manifested itself in a number of ways including:

The massive uptake of the REPS scheme by farmers had a negative impact on planting levels as REPS was seen to be in conflict with forestry.

Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) and forest certification became the fashionable buzz words, but the underlying concepts seemed to threaten the economic future of forestry.

There was a widely held belief that commercial forestry was not compatible with care for the environment, and "Sitka spruce" were certainly dirty words.

While all is far from rosy in the forestry garden, there are now suggestions that the sector has turned the corner and is in a position to face the future with much greater confidence. Grant and premium rates have been greatly increased, a more pragmatic and pro-active approach has been adopted towards integrating forestry into REPS, an expanded set of new environmental guidelines have been produced by the Forest Service, together with the Code of Best Forest Practice and the National Forest Standard, and the forest certification process has now, largely, been completed by Coillte.

To cap it all, that amazing body of people, "the general public", are now beginning to adopt "carbon sequestration" as one of their new buzz words, so we may yet live to see the day when it is no longer anti-social to have a few Sitka spruce trees growing in the lower field !

On the negative side, no progress has been reported on the thorny issue of securing increased premium payments for those who planted between '92 and '99. If this is not satisfactorily resolved, it could have a very negative impact on the future uptake of the forestry scheme. To date, the feedback from the EU Commission has been extremely negative and the Minister is now being called upon to provide national funds to those affected. This needs to be resolved sooner rather than later.