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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 38, Number 7. 15 April 1975

Beech Sell Out

page 7

Beech Sell Out

Commercial tenders have just been filed with the Government for wood from the South Island beech forests. The companies — many of them with overt Japanese interests (see box) all want deals on a maximum scale. The conservation movement is flatly opposed to this. The lines have been drawn for a prolonged and bitter fight.

What must concern New Zealanders is the role played by the N.2. Forest Service in the debacle so far. The Forest Service is the government department responsible for state-owned forests, and has an important responsibility to implement the public interests. The advantages of having most of the New Zealand beech forests in state ownership are thus being thrown away by the very department that is supposed to be safeguarding them.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the Westland beech schemes. Responding to pressures from commercial interests, the Forest Service has pressed against the furthest limits of ecological viability in an attempt to find enough timber for the industrialists' dream project, a kraft pulp mill.

A kraft pulp mill starts getting profitable at an output of 500 tons of pulp a day. To achieve this, more than 1,000 tons of wood a day must be logged and fed into this infernal machine, (the other half of the wood volume is wasted and is pumped out of the kraft digester as waste liquor). To run their kraft mill, the industrialists told Forest Service to find them 1,000 tons of wood a day on a thirty year cycle.

All these Wat Coast beech tenderers have links with Japanese interests, although one pretends to be an all-New Zealand enterprise. The companies are:
1.Hardwood Industries Development Ltd. — a consortium of UEB Industries, MacDonald Holdings, and Sumitomo Forestry of Japan.
2.Baigent—Oji — Sumitomo — this consortium is supposedly led by the Nelson timber firm of H.Baigent Ltd., but the real weight on the board is carried by eight Japanese paper companies belonging to the Oji and Sumitomo groups.
3.Beech Development Ltd. is a consortium led by N.Z. Forest Products Ltd. and Odlins, and there are ten other N.Z. companies with interests in transport, finance and timber. But this is only an investigating group/company; the eventual processing company will almost certainly be dominated by N.Z. Forests Products' Japanese partner Ataka & Co. with whom NZFP has already linked in the Mount Davey coal bid.

Beech trees don't grow fast enough to suit the pockets of Japanese industrialists, so almost half the beech forests, once logged, will be burnt and converted to pines. Pines grow like seven bandits but, sadly for the pulpmakers, there isn't enough beech forest in Westland to safely sustain a draft mill until the pines are ready for the chop. Never mind the safety, said the pulp men. So the Forest Service, always ready to oblige, have zoned for logging and conversion some 80,000 acres of erosion-prone hill country. Now that DSIR soil surveys have revealed this irresponsibility, the Forest Service is silent. There has been no response to demands that this land be withdrawn from the scheme, even though the hills are falling into the rivers at this very moment, as our photograph shows.

In response to outrage at its scheme, the Forest Service has zoned a few small areas as reserves. But it has refused all requests to reserve Westland's montane valleys, even though these are wilderness lands of National Park quality. The timber they hold is needed as pulp for the packaging industry.

The Beech Forest Action Committee recently analyzed computer data on the Forest Service's lowland biological forest reserves, 22% of them contain no forest at all. 43% have been subjected to logging, mining, roading, fire or other human agency. They are biased toward cut-over forest and forest types of low timber volume. All except one are smaller than the minimum size recommended by the Scientific Coordinating Committee on Beech Forests, and in most cases they would be unsuitable for any form of forestry if they had not been reserved.

The bias in these reserves is explained when it is considered that they were chosen by Forest Service officers using timber volume maps. After all, it was most important to ensure that wood useful for a kraft pulp mill was not tied up in reserves. But the resulting reserves are totally inadequate for their stated purposes, and a disgraceful reflection on the integrity of the Forest Service.

The Forest Service has offered timber for sate from 80,000 acres of erosion-prone lands under the beech scheme. This erosionscape is in Mawhera State Forest (Westland), in hill country recently burnt over and converted to pines.

The Forest Service has offered timber for sate from 80,000 acres of erosion-prone lands under the beech scheme. This erosionscape is in Mawhera State Forest (Westland), in hill country recently burnt over and converted to pines.

Last November, the Student Union Building at Victoria University was the scene of a hallowed convocation of forestry interests, known as the Forestry Development Conference. Before the leaders of the forestry-industrial complex, spokesmen for the Forest Service offered new targets for pine-planting. Set at more than twice the level of their 1969 targets, these new targets will provide enough wood to open a new complex the size of Kawerau every year from 1990 onwards. About 70% of this wood will be provided cheaply by the Forest Service, whose commercial operations lose money at the rate of 15 to 20 million dollars a year (the deficit is made up by the tax payer).

This must be seen for what it is: economic colonialism in a new form. The main market for this volume of pulp lies in Japan; and the Japanese are anxious to export their most polluting industries to countries that will supply subsidized raw materials for them. Profits will be remitted to Japan and to a few eager client companies in New Zealand. These companies, and the Forest Service will co-operate in mustering New Zealand labour to burn down native forest and plant pines. A million acres of native forest are considered by Forest Service as 'suitable for exotic conversion'.

The plans already announced for pulping lowland beech forest in Westland and Southland represent the first really massive assult on our native forests under this expansion plan. Designated for overseas interests by the N.Z. Forest Service, these plans show just how far a government department can go in selling out on our national heritage. Students must join other forces this year to stop the beech forest deal and show the government once and for all that resource sell-outs and mutilation of the environment will never again be tolerated by New Zealanders.

Come to SRC at 12 - 2 on Friday 19 April, where details will be announced of the forming of a Beech Forest Action Committee branch on Campus. Remits on the beech deal for NZUSA May Council will also be discussed. Please be there.