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Landownership Changes

Research into the economics of timber management has identified important distinctions between different ownership groups (e.g., Newman and Wear 1993; Pattanayak et al. 2004). In particular, these studies have documented more productive management focus on forest industry lands compared to all other ownerships. Investment patterns described in the previous section also highlight the 20 percent of timberland held by industry owners in the late 1990’s contains more than 60 percent of the plantations and therefore a large majority of invested forest capital. In effect, management on industry lands has been the most responsive to timber scarcity signals since 1970.

Changes in the wood products sector since 1999 have initiated a restructuring of forest capital that has not yet fully played out. Forest industry ownership, which stood at about 40 million acres in 1999, may have fallen to about 20 million acres in 2005 (Clutter et al. 2005) An extension of on ongoing trends along with announced plans by wood products firms suggests that very little timberland may be owned by the forest products industry by 2010.

Sales of forest industry land may have several causes and implications. Some of these forests simply have much higher values in a developed use and are a part of the general urbanization process described earlier. A recent study in Georgia (Wear and Newman 2004) indicated that about 6-7 percent of industry timberland in 2002 was in a land value class that could not be sustained by timber production alone –i.e., a conversion class. By the year 2010, 25 percent of the timberland would be in the conversion class if population grows as expected (Figure 43). Georgia contains some of the most active development areas in the South and these estimates are consistent with land use projections from the Southern Forest Resource Assessment (Wear and Greis 2002).

modified: 07-Feb-2017
created by: John M. Pye

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