I am just back from the Green Triangle, from canoeing the
Glenelg, four days actually, and driving via Warrnambool and then back by
Byaduk and Penshurst you cannot miss the plantations, rolling like dark water
over the hills and valleys mainly pine, some gum (blue gum). The soil up this
way is poor for farming but fine for pine. I am guessing the pines like the
acidity of limestone soils.
Much
of the planting was the result of the failed managed investments schemes Great
Southern and Timbercorp. A managed investment scheme (MIS) allows investors to
pool their investment and pay a manager to manage on their behalf. As I understand
it investors were encouraged to take the maintenance costs out as an upfront
tax deduction and that was the attraction of a managed investment scheme.
Timber has the advantage as do a number of agricultural products where there
are high maintenance expenses over a long period of time, in tax terms that
generated a good deduction that was brought forward to the time of the
investment. It seems an artefact to me, just too clever: short term thinking harnessed
to a long term product. There was something of the ponzi to the way the schemes
managed the funds they attracted, buying production to keep the price up. And
then the tax department I have been told disallowed bringing so much of the
expenses to the time of the investment and ruled that the expenses had to be
deducted closer to the time they were incurred. Owww. That’s a convenient
explanation but not accurate. There was tax doubt but governments and the ATO
worked to reassure investors. Maybe it would have been better if they hadn’t.
In
the meantime a lot of land had been bought and a lot of trees had been planted,
and not just in the south-west of Victoria but as far away as the Tiwi island,
which was controversial.
The
idea of the plantations is to grow trees fast and to industrialize the farming
of timber. Plantations are monocultures – one tree species spread over a
landscape like a disease. The industrialization of forestry means that many
forestry values, say those espoused by Aldo Leopold are destroyed. It is all
about the money and systems to reduce costs. It is about shortening the
forester’s traditional long vision to something as short as a tree’s life can
be squeezed into. It is about industrializing forestry, which is about
simplifying everything to cut costs – and also to push costs especially unknown
costs into the future on to other people and future generations. A forest is
not a monoculture but a living diverse ecosystem, a series of habitats, a
structured mosaic of ecotopes. These plantations are sucking up water and
dropping the water table. One local told me that the level of the Blue Lake at
Mt Gambier had a dropped a metre. The local ecology is locked up for a long
time.
The
land is only productive for two rotations of timber so some 60 to 100 years, and
after that the land is depleted of nutrients and clotted with roots. Will it be
useable? What are we leaving future generations? Plenty of what economists like
to call “externalities”, as if these are not part of their dream of a perfect
economic system.
The
MIS are a touchstone for how economics and government treats the environment,
seeking short-term profit blindly.
No comments:
Post a Comment