Japan has about 2.53 mil ha of forests, 70% of the total land area, and two thirds of them were afforested, especially after World War II. So it is very important to take care of them, in the two senses that we continue to enjoy various public utility functions of forests and that we sustain to increase the forest stock as one of the important renewable resources. But Japanese forestry policies have mainly aimed to encourage domestic forestry as one of the industrial sectors. Environmental points of view have been secondary, therefore they have not worked well for the maintenance of forests, when the forestry sector became structurally depressed.According to 50 small scale forest owners who were interviewed in Iwate prefecture, reported that almost all of their forests which they afforested after WWII, haven't been thinned to mature them. From the comparison of the macro statistical data of labor input for growing forests by Ministry of Agriculture and the standard growing manual produced by local governments, the actual input of labor is short of that required for growing healthy forests.Therefore it is now necessary to develop forestry policies primarily oriented to environmental purpose. To clarify the environmental viewpoint of forests, I explained following points using dynamic optimization model of forests.(1) There are two ways to realize the social optimization of forest stock decentrally among the three subjects, which means foresters, timber consumers, and the people who enjoy public utility of forests. These are taxation on the timber price which make the consumers pay the opportunity cost of the public utility of forests, and to directly tax the beneficiaries of it.(2) The former policy realize the optimization of the amount of trade flow of timbers, and the input of growing the forest stock at the same time, but the latter one has only the second effect. Therefore in the latter case, we must also introduce some policy to optimize the timber trade. It is difficult to control the amount of timber trade centrally, consequently anyway it is necessary to use the price policy. For this reason it is better to introduce the first policy.However, we have to spend a lot of time to achieve international consensus on environmental prices for the renewable resources. Therefore, until such consensus is reached, it is necessary to take measures to ensure sufficient inputs to grow the forest stock. I propose here the Wage Parity Deficiency Payment System of Foresters (WPDPSF). Currently, the bottleneck in forest management is the shortage of young foresters caused by low wage rates relative to the hard and dangerous work comparing with, for example, that of the outdoor workers of construction sector. In WPDPSF system, if the discounted calculated production cast of timber in which the wage rate of foresters is increased to the same level as the outdoor workers' of construction sector is more than the actual market price of timbers (discounted), then the government subsidizes the deficiency. The burden on the government from this system will be about 100bil yen per year.
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Jan 1, 2002
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