Plantation Sustainability
Economic
Economic contribution of plantations
National
Plantation forestry has grown to dominate Australia’s forestry and timber industries, which have a combined annual value of turnover of some $18 billion.
Plantations supplied 66% of the logs harvested from Australia’s native forests and plantations in 2008. Those logs are used to make sawn timber, fibreboard, particleboard, plywood, paper and other products. In 2006-7, plantations accounted for $4.5 billion out of a total forestry industry (ie native and plantation products) industry turnover of $6.6 billion.
Plantations are providing increasing rural employment opportunities with over $1.4 billion worth of capital investment for wood processing capacity added to existing timber and paper mills during 2002-2007. In 2006 5,000 people were employed in growing and managing plantations and around 76,000 were involved in timber and paper processing and other industry support services related to plantations.
In 2008 plantations occupied 1.97 million hectares, the equivalent of less than 7% of the land used by non-grazing agricultural and horticultural crops.
Australian forests produce 27.4 million cubic metres of wood each year. This wood is processed by nearly 1,000 mills, to produce:
- 4.0 million cubic metres of sawn wood;
- 1.9 million cubic metres of panels; and
- 3.2 million tonnes of paper and paperboard products
Australia's forest industry:
- turns over $18 billion/pa, of which $13.3 billion comes from the plantation industry;
- employs 83,400 people (1% of national employment);
- contributes 1% to GDP;
- contributes 7.5% of manufacturing output;
- exports $2.1 billion/pa of timber products;
- imports $4.1 billion/pa of timber products ($1.45 billion is paper and paperboard); and
- has a trade deficit in timber products of about $2 billion/pa.
Sources: Australia’s Plantations 2009 (pdf), Australia’s Forests at a Glance 2009 (pdf) Bureau of Rural Sciences,
