Survival of forest products industry hangs in the balance

By Carl Portman

There is good news and not so good news in Alaska’s forest products industry.

The good news is that there has been a robust export market the last several years for Alaska logs. The not so good news is statewide the industry is suffering and enduring major raw material shortages.

Total volume harvested across all land ownerships in Alaska last year was only 180 million board feet, said Keith Coulter, Forest Manager at Koncor Forest Products. In contrast, Idaho harvested one billion board feet over a land base that is much smaller than Alaska, Coulter told RDC’s Alaska Resources Conference in Anchorage last month.

“What’s the problem?” Coulter asked. “The problem is that many forested areas that industry relies upon in Alaska are federally-owned.” Coulter noted changes in national priorities, extensive litigation by environmental groups, and competing federal land management objectives and policies have sharply curtailed logging across the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska.

As a result, massive industry-wide restructuring has occurred and the industry as a whole has been decimated, Coulter said. “In 1990 there were 3,450 logging, sawmilling, pulp mill, and forest products jobs in Southeast Alaska,” Coulter pointed out. “In October 2009 only 200 jobs were reported in this sector statewide.”

“The very survival of the timber industry hangs in the balance with total industry harvest levels reaching their lowest level in a half century,” Coulter said, quoting an Alaska Division of Forestry Statewide Assessment.

The forest manager said the industry faces many critical challenges such as intensively framed environmental campaigns. “Perhaps our message needs to adapt to capture more social license by targeting the benefits of forest management versus ‘our remaining mill needs more old-growth,’” Coulter suggested.

Without a serious overhaul of federal land management policy, more hard times are ahead for the industry, Coulter predicted. He said a future of chronic uncertainty is likely if there is no long-term relative raw material supply, resulting in difficulty in attracting any large-scale investment. Coulter said Alaska could also expect a loss of interdependent milling infrastructure, including saw mills, biomass, and secondary wood products manufacturing, as well as a loss in funding for schools and roads. He warned conference attendees, “if the effort that halted forest management on Alaska federal lands was this effective, your sector is just as at risk.”

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