Farm Forestry New ZealandOctober, 2022
NZFFA submission on Industry Transformation Plan
The Ministry for Primary Industries has issued a draft Forestry and Wood Processing Industry Transformation Plan. This is a welcome contribution and appears to be well researched, but we feel it lacks real aspiration. Should our pastoral exports face growing challenges over environmental performance, forestry exports will be needed to replace them. Forestry is a more benign land use, and could prove the long-term mainstay of the economy; but it will require threats like climate change, single species, and sector fragmentation to be boldly addressed. At present the Plan is more incremental than transformational.
The Plan proposes a vision and actions to transform the sector and lists five goals for industry transformation:
- To reduce carbon emissions by 6.9 million tonnes by 2030 and 54 million tonnes by 2050 (this may be in aggregate or per annum. It’s not stated)
- To scale up domestic wood processing by an additional 3.5 million cubic metres of roundwood a year
- To increase export earnings from value added wood products by $600 million by 2040 (one assumes per annum, though it’s not stated)
- To increase the annual use of wood products in construction by 25% by 2030
- To increase the planting of alternative species to 20% of all planting by 2030 (i.e. in afforestation and reforestation combined).
To achieve these goals the Plan proposes actions in four priority areas:
- Growing (productive, sustainable forests)
- Processing (modernising and expanding)
- Marketing (growing and diversifying)
- Facilitating (improving system settings).
Each of the areas has a number of objectives with proposed actions to achieve them.
We support all of the objectives and most of the actions. Some actions we strongly support, while on a few we are neutral.
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