New Guinea and Papua in 1948

FAO in Unasylva Vol 2 # 6 1948 New Guinea and Papua

The article viewed the territories as under the administration of the Department of Forests of the Territories in conjunction with the Commonwealth Forestry and Timber Bureau of Australia. They have a land area of over 46 million hectares (115 million acres) about equally divided between Papua and New Guinea. Together they are 60 to 70 percent forested. The population is in the neighbourhood of a million. Forest types include the lowland rain forest from sea level up to about 700 meters (2,000 ft.) elevation. The midmountain forest consists of Araucaria and oak; and the mossy forest at 2,300 to 3,500 meters (7,000 to 11,000 ft.) elevation is composed of Nothofagus, Phyllocladus, Dacrydium, Libocedrus, and Podocarpus. There are also some swamp forests and savannah types of little economic value except for mangrove. The lowland rain forest resembles the mixed dipterocarps of Indonesia, the Philippines, Indochina, and Malaya. The Araucaria resembles that of northeastern Australia, and the mossy forest is similar to the indigenous type of New Zealand.

The ownership of forest land remains with the inhabitants either as individuals or as village groups. Government ownership must be obtained through purchase from the inhabitants before territorial forest reserves can be established.

There has been extensive coverage of the territories by aerial photographs taken during the war. There has also been considerable botanical collection and classification work by the Australian Forest Products Laboratory of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research at Melbourne, and by the state botanist of Queensland in Australia. There are, however, only very rough estimates of the volume of timber in the territories. Such estimates place the rain forests at 38 to 114 m3 log volume per hectare (640 to 1,630 cu. ft. per acre) and the Araucariaoak forest is said to carry about 1.1 million m3 (40 million cu. ft.) over a total area of 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres). During the war, U. S. Army sawmills produced considerable quantities of lumber. There are now 11 sawmills operating which in 1947 produced about 21,000 m3 (740,000 cu. ft.) of lumber. The Australian government operates a sawmill to train local sawyers and some skilled laborers. As production expands, Australia hopes to meet not only the present annual requirements of the territories, but to obtain considerable quantities of hardwoods for Commonwealth use. Although pre-war annual consumption of timber in the territories was not great, it is estimated that rehabilitation requirements will need almost 23,600 m3 (830,000 cu. ft.) a year for the next five or six years. Minor forest products include sago from the Metroxylon palm, nipa palm leaves for thatching, mangrove bark for tannin, dammar gum, canes, and bamboos.

Among the problems facing any forestry program in the territories, one of the most urgent is the control of shifting cultivation. Territorial forest reservations will have to be made to meet local demands and expanded export industries. A comprehensive inventory should be made, taking advantage of the excellent aerial photographs that are available. It will be necessary to secure trained foresters, and such training is being provided at the Australian Forestry School at Canberra. Plans are under way for a research program in silviculture through the Commonwealth Forestry and Timber Bureau, and in products through the C.S.I.R. at Melbourne.

Evidence of the increasing awareness of the silvicultural potential of plantations – and the new internationalism – is seen in the resolutions and subject matter of international conferences and meetings. At the Fourth World Forestry Congress (1954) in India, it was recommended that an international commission be set up on the use of exotic species for planting in the tropics. In 1957 the Seventh British Commonwealth Forestry Conference resolved that a book be published about experience with exotic species in the Commonwealth (Streets, 1962). In the 1950s both the International Poplar Commission and the Teak SubCommission were set up by the FAO with the great bulk of their work focused on plantation crops.

The increasing importance of eucalypts for plantations was indicated by the publication by FAO in 1954 of the first edition of Eucalypts for Planting and the establishment of a ‘Eucalypt Clearing House’ service in 1962 by the Forestry and Timber Bureau in Australia to provide information and well-documented seeds for research and commercial plantations.

And, according to Lamb (1973), the FAO Seminar on Tropical Pines in Mexico in 1960 more than anything else awakened tropical countries to the value of these species.

These initiatives and the gathering momentum of interest prompted what became the pivotal FAO World Symposium on Man-Made Forests and their Industrial Importance in Canberra in early 1967. The symposium, with participants from 41 countries and producing over 2000 pages of papers in three weighty volumes, testified to the increasing emphasis on plantations and their expanding role across the world.

Many of the trends initiated in the 1950s and 1960s accelerated in the 1970s, new projects multiplied, afforestation became an important part of national forest policies, incentives were introduced to encourage private sector tree planting, and the importance of trees and forest in the environment became more widely recognized.

In this period, Brazil’s afforestation rate peaked at an astonishing 0.5 million ha per year, Australasia’s, Europe’s, and Africa’s largest man-made forests were all created, namely Kaingaroa in New Zealand, Kielder in England, and Usutu in Swaziland, incidentally all with exotic conifers, and both China and India pursued increasingly ambitious planting programmes in successive development plans.

In these latter two countries at least, equal emphasis was given to the environmental roles tree planting could play. China sought to tackle desertification by planting Populus spp. in the temperate north and for dune stabilization using Casuarina spp., as well as continuing the massive Chinese fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata) afforestation in the central south of the country. In India one of the key programmes specifically targeted waste land afforestation.

In the tropics numerous attempts to plant mahoganies (mainly Swietenia macrophylla) and other valuable hardwoods of the Meliaceae family failed because of poor silviculture and an inability to cope with Hypsipyla (H. ferrealis and H. grandella) shoot borer damage (Evans and Turnbull, 2004). In many well-wooded countries planting came to be seen as a sensible handmaiden to achieve satisfactory regeneration. For example, in Sweden since the 1940s