The Economic Contribution of Biotechnology and Forest Plantations in Global Wood Supply and Forest Conservation

Over the past 30 years industrial plantation forests have become a major supplier of industrial wood. The reasons for this change are several and include the improved economics of planted forests due to technological innovations, the increases in natural forest wood costs due to increasing inaccessibility and rising wood costs from natural forests due to various pressures from environmentalists to reduce harvesting in old-growth forests. Forestry today is on the threshold of the widespread introduction of biotechnology into its operational practices in the form of sophisticated tissue cultures, which produce clonal seedlings, and through the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which produce desired tree and wood traits. As more of the world’s industrial wood is being produced on planted forests, the potential to introduce genetic alterations into the germ plasm utilized in planting is obvious. In many cases the biotechnology likely to be introduced in forestry is simply an extension of that being utilized in agriculture, e.g., herbicide-tolerant genes. However, biotechnology in forestry is also developing applications unique to forestry, e.g., genes for fiber modification, lignin reduction and extraction, and to promote straight stems and reduced branching. This paper discusses the growing role of plantation forests and the potential impacts of biotechnology on forestry. Traditional breeding and some aspects of biotechnology are discussed briefly and some of the various types of biotechnological innovations in progress in forestry and that may be forthcoming over the next decade or two are identified. A quantitative estimate is made of the potential economic impact of one transgenic application—that of the herbicide-resistant gene in forestry—and some of the potential environmental benefits associated with various types of biotechnology innovations are discussed.