Managing Partner of Index Group It’s noticeable that the forest producer, in general, has a certain aversion to continuing to plant forests due to the low price practiced by large companies. Many are converting their areas into agricultural lands. Is this a threat to the industry? Among the market studies we carried out throughout 2020, two customers specifically asked us to address this issue, making a historical analysis of the conversion rate from forests to agriculture in different states. These customers wanted to understand how this phenomenon could threaten the availability of wood in the future. Conversion is a threat in some regions, but it is an isolated threat, and to understand this, it’s worth pondering a few points. First, we need to be reminded of something very basic: each hectare of land has its vocation. There are lands of agricultural or forestry vocation, and the forestry vocation is unfortunately defined by exclusion, that is, land of forestry vocation is marginal. We plant where there is no technical feasibility to plant agricultural crops. Although it is not technically feasible to plant agricultural crops in forest lands, technically it is possible to do the opposite. Some of the most interesting forests in terms of
productivity in Paraná are forests planted in agricultural lands. For a number of reasons, mainly due to the wrong private stimulus policies and poorly planned development programs, a series of small and medium-sized rural landowners were convinced to convert agricultural areas into forest areas. With a few exceptions, this is not something that should happen often, because much more revenue is generated in agricultural areas for these producers. If we look at the evolution data regarding cultivated forests in Paraná, we see that the state reached the peak of this reduction in 2012, when many producers began to see that it wasn’t good business for them and went back to farming. So it’s not a recent phenomenon.
E N TR E V I S TA | I N T ER VI EW
Marcelo Schmid
Companies must do something they have not yet done: create well-planned promotion and partnership programs, which guarantee the permanence of the producer until the end of the forest cycle, until the cutting of the forest. This strategy is extremely interesting, because we can create forests without mobilizing capital on the land, without creating land conflicts while also contributing to regional socioenvironmental development. But it takes planning and structured investment to ensure that producers stay until the end.
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