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Discussion and Conclusions

The Southern United States is the largest single producer of timber products in the World. Most of the region’s production comes from private land and is consumed domestically, and projections suggest that these facts will remain unchanged. The South has become increasingly prominent in domestic timber product markets because of rapidly increasing productivity on private land, improved product manufacturing technology, and the shrinking timber harvests in other parts of the country. Projections of the Draft 2000 RPA show that the South will remain the Nation’s dominant timber producing region, and those of SRTS given here appear to support that finding. Continued dominance over the next several decades will be enabled by steadily advancing technology in timber growing and wood utilization and by limited harvest increases in other parts of the United States. The South’s dominant role will depend partly on an increasing rate of harvest of hardwood resources. Hardwood volume growth will outpace harvest volume for at least 25 to 30 years. Southern industrial and nonindustrial timberland owners are expected to continue to invest in and expand the area of pine plantations. Faster growth, permitted by genetic improvements, more intensive use of mechanical and chemical means of competition control and greater use of fertilizers, and higher harvest frequency of such plantations enable substantial increases in aggregate output of softwood. Despite the rising role of the South and the rapid rise in production from pine plantations, output is not projected to keep pace with demand expansion, and higher prices are projected to be the result. The rising prices will likely mean rising product imports and continued changes in product manufacturing technologies, which will combine to partially offset the effects of more expensive timber on the prices of wood-based final products.

One result of the projected increasing prevalence of pine plantations is a continued decrease in the area of private timberland in natural forest management types. Part of the loss of natural types, however, comes from the liquidation of forests to accommodate urban expansion. Such land use pressures are projected to depress the total area of timberland in some parts of the South, especially in the heavily populated Atlantic Coast States from Virginia to Florida. The loss of timberland there is projected under the base case scenario to be offset in the aggregate by the gains in some parts of the northern and western regions of the South.

The projected increase in acreage and growth rate of southern pine plantations implies that forest product manufacturing opportunities will improve. Investment opportunities will exist for developing capacity and technology to utilize small diameter logs coming from pine plantations. But such rising economic opportunities may have to be squared with, or be limited by, issues surrounding the losses of some ecological values associated with the losses of natural management types. We note that the private forests of South are not projected to be dominated by pine plantations. Although the projected rise in pine plantation area is to match the projected fall in timberland in natural forest management types in our base case scenario, natural types in all scenarios are projected to be the dominant kind of private timberland in the region in 2040. In some places, such as southern Georgia and northern Florida, however, pine plantations are projected to dominate the landscape. Along the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains from North Carolina to Texas, pine plantations are projected to be the largest single forest management type, but they will not comprise a majority of forests on most of the Coastal Plain. Nevertheless, a question remains as to whether the large plantation acreage increases projected for some regions under some scenarios would be acceptable to local residents, for whatever reasons, or whether any local opposition to them would stop them from being established.

The projections reported here are based on validated empirical models of land use, timber supply-and-demand relationships, and reasonable assumptions about timber demand growth. The projections rely on what have been shown to be relatively stable patterns of product consumption, economic growth, technological change, population growth, and land use choices. As with all such models, projections are contingent on the stability of economic relationships, consumer tastes, and assumptions about changes in national and World economies. Further, the emergence and success of not yet conceived technologies is impossible to gauge. We caution, therefore, that because these relationships, consumer preferences, technologies, and other factors will change in the future, the reliability of such a projection becomes progressively lower as the time projected into the future increases.

The forest sector depends heavily on long production periods and large capital investments, and these characteristics would seem to work in favor of making valid projections of the future. People can be reasonably expected to continue to demand wood for furniture and housing and paper for packaging and writing. Hence, projections about the sector over coming decades can be made with some confidence by evaluating the growth of trees already in the ground and timber product manufacturing capacity already in place. As a result, forest sector projections may be more reliable than similar projections made for other sectors of the economy. Nevertheless, the details of projections are notoriously unreliable. Hence, one should not view the projected dates of key thresholds, peaks, and troughs with confidence. Instead, one should view the projections as maps of overall trends if current consumer preferences, supply-and-demand relationships, and trends in technology remain stable. Expect the future of projected variables to mimic the bumpiness of the past, when there were periods of increases and periods of decreases in timberland area, harvests, prices, product shares, and trade.