Timber Supply: Goals, Prospects, Problems

Abstract

tury that the specter of scarcity became so persistent as to goad the rulers into passing preventive ordinances and founding a forestry profession to enforce them [14]. In mid-seventeenth century, at the end of the devastating Thirty Years' War, population was growing steeply, and industries were becoming prominent: mining and the processing of minerals; glass and china manufacture; the making of charcoal, potash, and resin derivatives. Every one of these activities used as an input. The doctrine of mercantilism was at large, and huge quantities of were floated down to the seaports for shipbuilding in pursuit of export trade [9, p. 21]. Foresters, who by then were managing forests for and other resources, looked around them at the exploitation and preached that there would be a shortage and that only a policy of sustained yield could avert disaster. The threat of famine and the necessity for sustained yield became two of the tenets of faith of the forestry professional subculture [12]. That was decades before the time of Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay. The old tenets of faith were echoed in the teachings of America's forestry fathers, Bernhard Fernow [15, 35] and Gifford Pinchot [28], and are reechoed today in the thinking of foresters and of many others as well. The notion of impending scarcity is not altogether ridiculous. The world's physical inventory of has shrunk steadily over the centuries. Real prices of generally have risen. Consider our western softwood mainstay, Douglas-fir, on the national forests. Before the turn of the present century, it was essentially without market value. Speaking in terms of constant 1967 dollars per thousand board feet of standing timber, the average price was about $2 at the time of World War I, $4 just before World War II, and $8 immediately thereafter. It had cleared $16 by the mid-1950s and $32 by the mid-'60s [49, p. 332]. It completed still another doubling a year or two ago. Paper, which is produced by a heavily concentrated industry, has had a relatively circumspect price history. But take the case of lumber, which is the undifferentiated product-a rather heterogeneous product--of a highly fragmented industry, long the dominant user of wood. Its prices are notably sensitive to resource conditions. If one searches out wholesale price data for the United States since the 1790s, deflates the index with an all-commodity average, and carries out the necessary splicing of successive series, he finds an amazingly consistent long-run upward trend of nearly 2 percent annually [19, pp. 17-18]. The trend appears to be somewhat the result of raw-material cost trends and greatly the result of lagging technology in the conversion of standing to end products-that is to say, it is evidence of a supply problem, a scarcity problem [60, pp. 179-181; 61, pp. 517-519; 62, p. 596]. The long trend of lumber prices has comprised bursts in which real price has risen at an annual rate of 5 to 10 percent or more during a period of 2 to 5 years or so, interspersed by calm periods as long as 30 years when the yearly rise was averaging perhaps one-half percent or less. That is to say, the long-term up-sloping graph is formed of a series of near plateaus situated at successively higher elevations by virtue of the steep cliffs connecting them. 1 Timber refers to standing trees as sources of wood, whereas forest refers to biological systems involving trees for or for other purposes, such as scenery. Logs, lumber, plywood, paper, and other commodities derived from the substance of trees are referred to collectively as timber products, or wood products.