The Timber Supply and its Prospects

Progress, Volume XII, Issue 11, 1 July 1917, Page 1025

The Timber Supply and its Prospects

By S. I. Clarke

(Rend before the Wellington Master Builders Association.)

This subject has for several years occupied the attention of our Federated Council, and it is not too much to say that good work has been done in connection therewith, but the matter is not receiving that attention from local and state authority which its importance demands. Accordingly, with the present price of building timber before our eyes, and the present difficulty of obtaining anything like adequate supplies of seasoned and reliable building and joinery material, no apology is needed for making this subject a special feature of the deliberations of our Federated Associations.

At the risk of being classed as either amiable faddists or troublesome alarmists, we must make continued and increasing demands on the attention of State authority and Corporate bodies, for a much more systematic and comprehensive policy in the matter of providing for a permanent and continuous supply of commercial timber.

That our New Zealand building timbers are rapidly disappearing there can be no manner of doubt, and that the natural supplies of what have been in the past, the great timber producing countries of the earth, are in the same perilous condition, is undeniable. The difficulty is to arouse public interest and activity in time to prevent very serious trouble, if not indeed disaster. An impending danger may be partly realized, but until the menace lays its hand upon us we are apt to allay our fear by the hope that in some way or other we shall escape, but from the fact that the pains and penalties are to some extent already upon us in the shape of increasing' costs and diminishing supplies, it is not too much to hope for an early awakening of the people to a sense of the seriousness of the outlook as regards commercial timbers. A glance of the conditions as recorded in other parts of the world in this connection, will help us the more readily to understand how urgent is the need for action here; seeing that it will show how hopeless it is for us to expect relief, in the form of cheap, or even reason-ably-priced timber from overseas, to say nothing of the foolishness of depending on foreign sources of supply of a material which can be readily and profitably produced at our own doors.

In the Report of the British Royal Commission on Coast Erosion and Afforestation 1909, page 9, we find the following:—

“In the case of timber imported to this country, the rise in price has been accompanied by a more or. less marked reduction in quality, thus the actual increase in value, has been greater even than the figures indicate. Mr. Parry, engineer in chief to The Liverpool Waterworks, a large buyer of timber, finds that the cost has gone up in ten years fullyso per cent... .Mr. Margerison, whose experience of the timber trade is widely recognised, thinks that during the past ten or twelve years a rise of about 50 per cent, is quite within the mark.... Mr. Miller, who has had extensive experience as a timber merchant in Canada, the United States, Scandinavia, and Russia, went so far as to say that in less than thirty years there will be no timber available, unless the different countries of the world set about

replanting immediately la 190 S the United States Department of Agriculture published a tabular statement of the prices from 1886 to 1908, of the more important classes of timber in that country. The figures shown in many cases show a rise of over 100 per cent.” It is true, we still read in timber journals and trade catalogues, of the inexhaustible supplies available, but these statements are made by men whose object it is to push business and whose interests are in the direction of keeping up, or still further raising present prices. It is safe to say that in our own land the rise in price and the lowering of quality has been quite as marked as in the instances quoted from Europe and America : for, whereas in former times, the retail price list was a simple statement of the relative cost of heart and sap timber, or of first and second class, the present day catalogue is of such a character as to be hardly intelligible to anyone outside the timber trade, in one or other of its branches, and the present day grading is such as to include a large amount of stuff which in former times would not have been accepted as having any market value. It is unnecessary to quote prices to prove the foregoing statement in a memorandum addressed to a body of men whose trade knowledge and business experience have made them familiar with the facts, all our present energies are required in the direction of urging for some early action towards placing the future of our timber supplies on a better and more business-like footing.