The demands of the industrialized world


Timber suppliers race to keep up with the modern world' s insatiable demand for low - cost, disposable items like paper tissues, babies' nappies, chipboard bookshelves, and ice - cream sticks. The result: forests are being destroyed too fast to recover.

Often people don' t realize that they are using something made from wood: camera or calculator cases, for instance, may contain pulp made from Papua New Guinean hardwoods. And paper tissues may have been made from wood from North American and Russian old - growth forests.

Modern consumer societies waste huge quantities of wood, causing areas of forest to be degraded and destroyed unnecessarily.

Picture of a logging truck
Industrialized countries have become used to paying low prices for raw materials. Timber companies compete to supply manufacturers as cheaply as possible. Their desire to keep production costs down often leads them to extract timber in highly destructive ways. Sometimes they are helped by government subsidies which enable them to flood the market with cheap timber.

In some areas, loggers cut trees selectively, picking out the most valuable trees and leaving the rest. Although this can be done so that it does little harm to the forest, the felling process often damages or destroys other trees and plants. In addition, when loggers build roads to remove the timber they degrade large sections of forest. Frequently, within weeks of building a road through a tropical forest, the forest on either side of the road will be cleared and replaced by farmland and settlements.

Elsewhere, loggers clearcut old - growth forests, removing every tree and plant. These are then made into paper or chipboard. Sometimes forests are left to regenerate of their own accord. Often, however, foresters replace them with single - species plantations, in which almost no other plants or animals will live.

Fast - growing species are popular plantation choices. Eucalyptus, for example, can be ready for cutting in just nine years. But its rapid growth rate requires large quantities of water. In some parts of Portugal, eucalyptus plantations are upsetting the water table, causing droughts and eliminating native species.




Copyright 1996, The World Wide Fund For Nature