Site management and productivity in tropical plantation forests. Workshop proceedings, 7-11 December, 1999, Kerala, India

It has been widely recognized that an increasing proportion of the demand for wood supply should be met by timber harvest from planted forests rather than native forests. This is particularly so in many tropical and subtropical countries which have either established large areas of plantation forests (e.g., Brazil, India) or have embarked upon plantation forestry at a significant scale (e.g., Vietnam, Uruguay). Investors in these plantations seek to benefit from their short rotation resources, largely facilitated by industrial scale operations. The strong need for growing plantation forests is evident in Kerala, where this workshop took place. Booth and Nambiar (2000) discussed the scenario inKerala, which was once endowed with rich forests and abundant supply of tropical timber, and supported a major inter-state timber trade. Deforestation has brought this to a halt. Despite the diminishing use of timber for house construction (because of prohibitive price and scarcity) the current consumption is estimated to be between 2.6 and 3.0 million m3 for a population of more than 29 million. More than half of this volume is taken from trees felled from homestead plantings, an unsustainable practice. India has an estimated area of about 4.8 million ha of eucalypt plantations, one of the largest areas under this genus in any one country. However, productivity of these plantations is low, less than 10 m3 ha-1 yr-1 and frequently too low to be commercially viable. However, as the workshop field visit to experimental sites showed, the potential for increasing productivity by improved management is high. Acute shortage in wood supply (industrial, pole, structural and fuel wood) is endemic in India where harvesting of timber from native forests is illegal. Indian pulp and paper industries have pointed out that the establishment of well-managed plantation forests in 1% of the estimated 130 million hectares of ‘degraded forest land’ would alleviate the current resource constraint on their development. Large areas of planted forests are reaching harvestable age and will go into second rotation in ecosystems where there are risks to sustainability. An example of this is the Acacia mangium plantations in Sumatra and Kalimantan in Indonesia which are managed on a 8-10-year rotation. Information for developing management options for maintaining and enhancing the productivity of successive crops is urgently needed, a point strongly made by several papers in this proceedings.

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