ACT Leader’s Comments Boost Forestry Industry

Thursday 8 March 2007

ACT Leader’s Comments Boost Forestry Industry Morale

Rodney Hide’s commitment that the Act Party believes in “allowing forest owners to keep the carbon credits that are due to the trees they own” will boost morale in the forestry industry, the Kyoto Forestry Association (KFA) said today.

KFA was commenting on Mr Hide’s “Forward Thinking” speech at the Newmarket Club in Auckland today.

“Mr Hide’s principled, unequivocal and environmentally-friendly commitments come just two days after positive signals from the National Party that the Opposition will engage with the forestry sector and that some credits will be given to post-1990 forests under a National-led Government,” KFA Spokesman Roger Dickie said.

“It is good to see these political parties understanding that the only way to get tree planting underway again is to restore confidence among those most likely to plant trees in the future – those who have invested in forestry in the past. There is not a new generation of forestry investors waiting in the wings. How our politicians deal with the carbon credit issue from the 1990s and early part of this decade will determine what tree planting we get next year and beyond.”

Mr Dickie said that while forestry investors were pleased by Act and National’s comments on carbon credit ownership, the deforestation crisis was too urgent to await a possible change of government and too important to be left to the electoral dice.

“Forestry investors and all New Zealanders who want to see tree planting underway again need to work on getting the current Government to understand that it cannot keep putting the boot into the forestry industry and expect us to want to invest in new planting in 2008,” he said.

“We look to the current Government to urgently restore our ownership of the carbon credits we earned through the 1990s, as we were promised by officials right through that decade and up till 2001.”

Mr Dickie said that KFA continued to work closely with the rest of the forestry industry in urging all political parties to endorse the six-point plan to get forest planting underway again, which was agreed last year by all key players in the industry, including the New Zealand Forest Owners Association (NZFOA), the New Zealand Farm Forestry Association (NZFFA), the Federation of Maori Authorities (FOMA) and KFA, after work with Government officials.

Good progress was being made by industry leaders in private discussions with parties other than Act and National, Mr Dickie said.

The united forestry industry’s six-point plan to get tree planting underway again calls for the Government to:

1. Remove the inequitable, retrospective ‘deforestation cap’.

2. Allow land owners with Kyoto-qualifying forests (forests planted from 1990) – as well as those replanting non-Kyoto forests after harvest – to financially benefit from the value of the carbon their forests remove from the atmosphere.

3. Introduce broad-based carbon charges, ensuring that all emitters of greenhouse gases face the same opportunity costs.

4. Ensure that New Zealand’s Kyoto policies have the best long-term outcomes for New Zealand, even if they don’t exactly mirror current Kyoto rules.

5. Develop a regime which puts a value on the environmental attributes of forestry, thereby encouraging investment in the sector.

6. Act immediately.

END

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