Sustainable Forestry in a World of Specialization and Trade

Abstract

Since Adam Smith economists have recognize that specialization provides the basis for a modern economy since it promotes increased productivity, lower costs and intra regional and international trade. Industrial forestry seems to have recognized this economic reality and in the past fifty years has been moved from obtaining almost all of its industrial wood from the logging natural forests to the production of over one-third of society’s industrial wood production from a trees cropping regime of planting, growing and harvesting intensively managed forests. However, much of the modern environmental movement is opposed to specialization and stresses the concept of individual forest sustainability for a spectrum of outputs, an approach directly the opposite to that of economic specialization. This paper attempts to reconciled these conflicting approaches by recognizing the substantial differences in the outputs mix generated by different forests, referring to the commonly accepted Brundtland Commission definition of a sustainable system and applying this concept to the multiple outputs of the various forest.