NB VOTES

Analysis

Creating a new future for N.B.'s forests

Twelfth in a series of expert analysis articles on major issues in the 2010 N.B. election

Last Updated: Friday, September 10, 2010 | 3:52 AM ET

CBC News

Thomas Beckley is a professor at the University of New Brunswick's Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management.

Beckley's areas of expertise include: social values in forest management, private woodlot management and Non-timber forest products.

His other research interests include community forestry, public involvement in forest management, forest-dependent communities and First Natoins forestry issues.

New Brunswick is a forested province and for the past two centuries forests have been a driver for the economy. There have been periods of major structural re-adjustment as the nature of the forest economy has changed, but until very recently it has been an economic mainstay.

Those days may be over.

The forest sector only employs half as many direct employees as it did only a decade ago, and employment in those sectors is not likely to rebound to previous levels even if production does.

However, that does not mean our forests no longer have value. Quite the contrary, our forests are more valuable than ever, but not in the sense that they provide raw materials for commodities that we can export.

Society has increasingly recognized the value of forests for their ability to sequester carbon, purify our air and water, provide habitat and biodiversity, increase property values and simply for the beauty they provide.

Unfortunately, there is a significant lag time between the emergence of such values and policy frameworks that support and enhance them.

Diversity is the key

There is strength and resilience in diversity. The New Brunswick Task Force on Forest Diversity and Wood Supply Report from 2008 demonstrated that we have the ability to manipulate our forest to emphasize certain tree species, certain forest types, and hence certain.

Much of the debate over forestry has to do with how much we are willing to manipulate the forest for human benefit beyond the baseline of what the natural Acadian forest provides. That nature produces is likely the most diverse of all. Everyone knows the expression, "don't put all your eggs in one basket."

The implication is that it is risky to do only one thing, or to have all your assets in one place because this increases vulnerability.

The past two decades of forest policy in New Brunswick has amounted to putting most of our eggs in one basket. Putting our eggs in many different baskets would mean growing many kinds of trees. It would mean not relying too heavily on one commodity or product line within the forest sector.

The 2007 closure of the Weyerhaeuser mill in Miramichi, N.B., resulted in about 150 layoffs. Thomas Beckley, a UNB forestry professor, writes that New Brunswick needs to rethink the future of any of the province's mills. (CBC)And, it would mean creating a diversity of institutional forms for management. Optimizing the value from our forests will likely mean creating and supporting a diverse array of tenure, ownership and management models.

For example, our current tenure system on Crown land is not well-designed to capture economic benefits from tourism or non-timber forest products. While the new policy does lay out targets for a wider range of tree species, for the past quarter century, our management philosophy for Crown land has favoured large, pulp and paper manufacturers.

Smaller sawmills and value-added producers have sometimes found it difficult to source enough wood and wood of sufficient quality to grow their businesses. The existing tenure structure in New Brunswick for Crown land "locks in" both uses and users.

That is, long-term commitments are made to certain users to allow them to grow and harvest certain crops. The conventional thinking was that producers needed that security in order to invest in necessary infrastructure.

However, one consequence of the system is that new entrepreneurs, including community-based initiatives, have found it nearly impossible to "break in" to the system to obtain wood allocations.

Even when new opportunities do arise, as with recent allocations of forest biomass, the rights to harvest went to existing large players in the industry. This stymies innovation and the development of new product lines, and "bottom up" economic development.

Other jurisdictions across Canada are well ahead of New Brunswick in terms of tenure reform, but all provinces with significant forest sectors are doing rethinking their policies for allocating their forest resources.

Ontario and British Columbia have implemented tenure systems where more of the wood is sold on the open market, increasing competition and hence the value of the wood.

Quebec is also decentralizing the management of its public forests. Even though there is strong evidence that the New Brunswick public favours reform of the tenure system (Nadeau et al. 2007), none of the last three governments have entertained the idea or agreed to even have a meaningful conversation about it.

Engaging the public

This leads to another issue, and that is the way government engages the public on forestry issues. From 2005 to 2008 the government commissioned three studies that related to the future of Crown land management in New Brunswick.

One was the forestry task force, which was a multi-stakeholder process to examine options for future management for the public forest.

The second was a social science public opinion survey that solicited New Brunswickers' views on their preferences for Crown land management.

'This "top-down" approach to policy development was taken even though one of the clearest findings from the public opinion survey was that citizens were frustrated in their lack of ability to provide meaningful input on policy directions.'— Tom Beckley

The third was an economic study by Don Roberts and Peter Woodbridge that described which forest products show promise in the global market place and which are likely to continue to decline.

The three reports were released within eight months of one another in 2008 and there was considerable expectation that this would kick off an in-depth, public debate about the future of forest management in the province, with all the relevant information about societal preferences, ecological limitations and capabilities, and economic prospects on the table.

Instead, citizens were invited to email their suggestions during a short comment period, after which the government came forth with a set of policies that did not deviate significantly from the status quo.

Token recognition was given to public desires for greater environmental protection, but overall, more of the forest was made available for harvest and for manipulation to grow more fiber faster.

This "top-down" approach to policy development was taken even though one of the clearest findings from the public opinion survey was that citizens were frustrated in their lack of ability to provide meaningful input on policy directions.

Meaningful support for woodlot owners

A New Brunswick woodlot owner cuts trees on his property. (CBC)Nearly all parties give lip service to "supporting our woodlot owners."

After all, there are over 40,000 woodlot owners, perhaps as many as 100,000 persons living in woodlot owning households and a majority of these are likely voters.

However, while all parties claim to support woodlot owners, the parties in power for the last two decades have a poor track record for doing so.

Woodlot owners' ability to bargain with industry for fair price for their wood was undermined by a policy change in 1993; the Forest Extension branch which provided important expertise and technical support to woodlot owners was eliminated in 1999; silviculture funding has never been stable or long-term, and various election promises to woodlot owners have not been kept in recent years. Private forests are potentially the most productive as they are concentrated on the better land in the province.

As well, the management of private woodlots directly affect New Brunswick citizens as they are also concentrated where the rural and exurban residents live. Many woodlot owners and small-scale contractors have given up.

New direction, new voices, new opportunities

There has been a perpetual debate on forest policy for the last decade, and while we are clearly in crisis our policy solutions have been more backward than forward looking.

There has been little attempt to broaden our forest policy to recognize new forest values or new opportunities to generate wealth from a diverse forest.

Politicians continually come up with variations of the same solution, policies that intend to "grow more trees, faster" rather than policies that focus on quality, value-added, innovation, and supporting an entrepreneurial forest culture.

Rather than doing more of what we did before faster or more efficiently, we need to explore opportunities to harvest less wood, but generate more wealth from it.

Other jurisdictions, like Finland, Sweden and Taiwan have made just such a transition. We have been content to ship out a relatively undifferentiated raw commodity (newsprint, dissolving pulp, and 2 X 4s) to other jurisdictions where further value is added.

The people of New Brunswick want — and deserve — a forest management system that holds environmental quality as its top priority.

Providing jobs and generating wealth are important, but these are secondary or tertiary priorities for most New Brunswickers.

While we have made some improvements over the years on the environmental side of forest management, the gap between the policies citizens desire and the policies governments put forth does not appear to be narrowing and it may indeed be widening.