The Price of Woodchip
Posted by jennifer, August 28th, 2005 - under Uncategorized.
Tags: Forestry
On Saturday I attended a conference at the State Library of New South Wales sponsored by the Independent Scholars Association of Australia, NSW Chapter, entitled “Looking for Forests, Seeing Trees: A Continent at Risk”.
Senator Bob Brown of the Australian Greens was the keynote speaker.
It soon became apparent that many of Sydney’s ‘Independent Scholars’ hold Bob Brown in the highest of regard. The audience was clearly enthralled as he told the story of Recherche Bay – Tasmania’s equivalent of Sydney’s Botany Bay but still essentially a beautiful wilderness area of incredible historical significance according to Bob Brown.
He told of the first friendly encounters between French scientists and the local Aboriginals in 1792 and how now – shock and horror – timber company Gunns Ltd was going to clear fell the forests of Recherche Bay. And it was all for woodchip that would be sold to Japan for $10 a tonne.
We were repeatedly told that Gunns Ltd turns 90% of the 200 year old trees it fells into woodchip which are then sold to Japan for $10 a tonne. We were told it was the same across Tasmania. There would soon be no old growth forest left in Tasmania if the ruthless company Gunns Ltd supported by the horrible Howard-government had their way – and all for $10 a tonne. He described the situation as “a holocaust”.
During question time I asked Brown a question that went along these lines. Wasn’t 80% of old growth forest in Tasmania reserved, as well as 70% of the original extent of forest still being in existence? Hadn’t Recherche Bay already been logged? So to suggest that the last tree was about to be cut down in Tasmania was, to say the least, an exaggeration.
He responded along the lines that there are statistics and statistics (you know: ‘lies, damn lies and then there are statistics’) but the bottom line is that as more is logged, “the percentage protected increases and eventually all will have been logged and then they (Gunns Ltd) will claim that 100% is protected”.
The audience loved Bob and it was with gushing praise he was cheered off the stage and then departed the conference.
Maybe I should have asked a question about the $10 per tonne. I thought it was more like $150 per tonne, but I wasn’t sure.
I have just checked some sources tonight.
Brown is not alone is claiming a low price for woodchip. Jared Diamond in his much acclaimed book ‘Collapse’ quotes $7 per tonne (pg. 404).
When I queried this figure with Alan Ashbarry from Timber Community Australia early in the year he emailed me a copy of the Woodchip Settlement Price dated 18th February from Gunns Ltd for 2004 showing the price per tonne at $159.00 (Download file) and the note:
“Diamonds un-referenced figures on the value of export woodchips do not stand scrutiny. The current price for woodchips is the leading Australian Hardwood Chip Exporter (LAHCE) benchmark price settled at AUD 159.00 per BDMT (bone dry metric tonnes). This equates to US$120, it takes two bone dry metric tonnes of chip to make a tonne of pulp used in paper manufacture. The price for paper quoted by Diamond is overstated when compared to international benchmarks.”
I have checked this value against the value in the most recent publication from ABARE, see http://abareonlineshop.com/PdfFiles/PC13135.pdf (pg. 51).
The most recent figures here are for December 2004 with a total volume of 1,413,300 tonnes exported to Japan at a value of $214,147,000 which gives a value of $152 per tonne. This confirms the value of $159 to be about right and suggests the value of $10 per tonne to be complete rubbish.
I did suggest at the conference that they should check the price for woodchip. I hope that there were some independent and scholarly enough in the room to do so. If Brown could get something so basic, and readily available, wrong, as the price for woodchip, can you rely on much that he says?
You know rog the more you post the more you sound like Loius.
rog – no-one said anything about marxism. Families and local communities have been running farms and resources for thousands of years.
What is new is corporate factory farming and thousand mile ceasar salads – that is a product of the industrial revolution and fossil fuels. Quite possibly it will end when the fossil fuels become uneconomic.
Ender
I appreciate your concern for small rural communities, but when push comes to economic shove, the market is dominated by companies big enough to keep the costs down and operate profitably on small margins. A craft wood worker uses a couple of cubic metres of wood a year and may make wonderful furniture with it. However the sum of all those small operators is a very small proportion of the wood consumed by our society.
And in the end, no matter what size the individual wood harvesters and processors are, the total volume produced, relative to the global demand for the fibre in its many forms, is the main issue.
I could talk about this for weeks, but perhaps we have worked it over well enough for now? Email me if you want to continue.
I got as far as 3 minutes Ender, that botanist was saying that after 9/11 when planes were stopped for 3 days the temp dropped therefore……..I better go and tend my animal farm.
And that’s exactly right – it did Rog …. haven’t you kept up with the the fact that radiation levels have fallen … (and there was some very conservative Aussie scientists on the evaporation pan/radiation story)
It’s interesting though seemingly impractical Enders ideas may at times seem to us locked into our current world – I am much more shocked how closed your mind is to anything else than what’s in front of your nose… and what you now know. How much has the world changed in the last 100 years and last 10 years… and I bet the dinosaurs thought they knew absolutely everything for certain too until the change came … (and I’m not trying to be insulting either)
Phil, I reject Ender’s’ hypotheses because, as you so correctly observed, they are impractical.
Shocking as it may be to some there is more than enough to contend with in the real world without speculating on a world that does not exist.
As for dinosaurs, I’ve absolutely no idea what they thought but I feel comfortable with the hypothesis that it would be entirely focussed on what or who is for dinner?
rog – well thanks for trying. Global Dimming is based on some solid and peer-reviewed Australian science.
As I ususally end these conversations – time will tell.
Rick – I guess we have discussed it to death however that you for the discussion.
The point I’m making is that lots of things seem impractical before their time – steam engines, motor cars, aeroplanes, space flight, colour TV, antibiotics, vaccinations for major diseases, mobile phones, internet – self serve shopping, fill your own car with petrol, the GST, pollution controls in vehicles, lead free petrol, bans on smoking, etc etc … we have changed and will change in the future. I seriously believe that paradoxically global warming and restrictions on plentiful mobile energy (oil) will change our way of life in the next 10-30 years. This is like – NOW ! and we will need to make changes …
we don’t have to have the world as it is now.
Before we had an economy we had a society and before we had a society we had an ecology.
So I would have thought this hallowed blog was about exploring some of that – rejecting the extreme environmentalism – trying to steer a path through and do things better. One underlying thread in this forestry theme is about doing things better. Forestry can do better. We can expect some conservation of old regrowth systems with inherent aesthetic and ecological value while demanding more plantation timber. Just saying – well that’s what the market wants and what we do now is not how an enlighteded society should operate. And I don’t think foresters are bastards, or the industry are bastards or the workers are less than decent people either.
And we don’t have to run the future as some lefty marxist collective either (apologies to leftie marxists out there)….
(Hey Jen – how about editorial on what you want this blog to achieve – besides hone up IPA’s argument skills {he says cynically} :-) I mean for the look of it it seems to be pretty well right up any environmental proposition – are you proposing a middle or different course ?? …)
P.S. Yes Rog the global dimming stuff appears to be true – radiation levels have fallen but temperatures are up. Meaning that if we cleaned up pollution we might have more warming apparent.
Hey Phil, Belated response: This blog is a forum for discussion and somewhere for me to post information and ideas. I invite summaries of threads and correspondence to politicians from blog readers – if they copy the same to me I will likely post their writting as a guest post.