Mark Bowers (UCM): It will be an increasingly significant factor. A year ago I attended a seminar given by a leading Scandinavian forest products company. They presented themselves as a producer of a range of products; pulp, sawn timber, plywood and now biofuel too. Ultimately they said, when they harvest each log, they’ll decide, between their product areas where the fibre goes depending on the markets, demand and consumption. They we’re trying to reassure us that we’d still get plenty of wood, but were actually saying we’ve got access to this raw material and we’ll direct it to the market where we get highest yield. But need this be a bad thing? Perhaps it will support the price of timber, because there will be less raw material and we aspire to raising the perceived value of our products.
John Kissock (Scottish Forestry & Timber Technology Advisory Board): The difficulty with that is we’re talking about a subsidised industry consuming this wood fuel. We’re not comparing apples with apples. To kick-start the green energy industry, the government has heavily subsidised the power generators, enabling them to pay a higher price for the fibre. The power companies themselves may be saying they’re strategically placed to depend on imported material. But we can imagine what will happen if imported product goes into short supply and they have to buy locally. It will put domestic panel producers using locally produced small round wood and sawmill residues under severe pressure. Government policy hasn’t been thought through and, while WPIF, ConFor, the Forestry Commission and others have been very vociferous on this, more needs to be done to explain to politicians the linkages in the supply chain. We should establish a straightforward hierarchy of timber use; sawn products comes first because it locks in carbon, then use waste, recycled and residual material which cannot be used in wood products as fuel for combined heat and power and finally for power generation.
