Negotiations have been taking place on the new forestry programme (2014-2020) in recent days between forestry interest groups and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. Most stakeholders were assessing the various measures in the context of past programmes. So far, only the IFA has come out publicly to oppose it as reported recently when Michael Fleming said: “We could not recommend forestry as a land use option if the current draft document is not amended.”

The main areas of contention are the new grants and premia which many feel are too low and in most instances fall well short of the 2007 programme. Considering that this programme won’t be in operation until 2015, there is almost an eight-year period of reduced payments as well as a reduction in the premium period from 20 to 15 years. These are outlined in page 8.

However, the programme contains 11 measures in all including forestry and the environment, knowledge transfer, tree improvement programmes, forestry technology and proposals that address the needs of producer groups. These are located throughout Ireland and have the potential to drive the private forestry sector as they aim to encourage and facilitate private forest owners to work co-operatively in the management and marketing of their forest resource.

Forest technology

The measure on forestry technology will support new technologies for use in private forests, which will, over time, increase efficiency, reduce costs or contribute to reducing the environmental impact of forestry operations. It acknowledges the scale of the “new forests” and is designed to support small-scale technologies “which are applicable to private forest holders, forest contractors and haulage operators”.

The programme also acknowledges that forestry has an important role to play in helping Ireland achieve its international emission reduction target by substantially reducing the amount of carbon credits that Ireland may need to offset this shortfall.

In financial terms, the programme maintains that this could be quite significant as a recent study showed that the total amount of carbon sequestered (including harvested wood products) could average 5.3m tonnes per annum over the period 2021-2030. However, forestry will not provide the desired climate change benefits unless a sustained viable annual planting programme is achieved. COFORD – the Council for Forest Research and Development – has estimated this at 15,000ha. The current programme averages only half this which is a major disappointment.

A concerted effort by Ministers Tom Hayes and Simon Coveney is required to achieve a viable forestry programme. They will need to convince the Department of Finance to increase the forestry budget by at least 25% in the short-term over the current allocation of €110m. This will allow forestry and agriculture to expand and develop resulting in major benefits for both.