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Show THE FORESTS AREWASTED Lumber Industry Conditions are Revealed Re-vealed by the Government I orest Service That unstable and partly speculative specu-lative foreHt ownership in the west and south is the cause of frequent , over cutting of the market and waste of forest resources is announced by the forest service in a report just off the governnient press. Too large stocks of timber acquired from the public domain and too much timber I speculation mixed with the manufacture manufac-ture of lumber, says the service, underlie un-derlie the present unstability of the industry. All this, the service points out, concerns the lumber user. Many of the states are paying dearly for their lumber, because their own timber is largely used up and outside supplies can be obtained only at high costs for transportation. With little being be-ing done to grow new forests on cut-over cut-over lands, a more widespread shortage short-age of forest products is threatened in the future. The forest service advocates various vari-ous forms of open price co-operation among lumber manufacturers to make the industry more efficient and check wasteful over-production. But it Is strongly against changes in the present competitive character of the business through combinations to control the output or regulate the prices, even though advocated in the name of conservation. The report contains the boiled-down boiled-down conclusions of a body of timber tim-ber ownership and lumber business, undertaken by the forest service to find out how this business as con-! con-! ducted today effects forest conser- vation and the interests of users of 1 wood in the United States, and to , see whether the public policies for conserving the nation's forests ' wealth go Car enough. It is also ! sought to help the industry solve the I serious problems which confront it. f Added weight is given to the report i by the concurrence in its publication of the Federal Trade Commission, which co-operated with the Forest Service in the investigation. The j commission, however, reserves its specific conclusions or remedies for a report of its own to be published later. The Forest Service finds that the .main problem of the lumber industry indus-try has grown out of the hundreds of billions of feet of timber acquired acquir-ed cheaply a few years ago from the public domain. Lumbermen in the west are carrying large quantities of tiir.bcrlaad beyond all possible needs of their present sawmills and logging caraps. Widespread speculation specu-lation during the few years of sudden sud-den development carried the timber values very high, and many western stumpage holdings have been overcapitalized. over-capitalized. The business of making lumber, says the report, has thus been loaded load-ed down with investments in timber-land. timber-land. The productive branch of the industry has been interlocked too largely with speculations in its raw material; and instead of standing on its own feet as a manufacturing business, bus-iness, has tended to be the tail of the dog, made frequently to serve the exigencies of timber speculation. According to the report, pressure from an overload of timber is the first cause of general instability of the industry. For one thing, it has led to built ing mills beyond the demand de-mand for their productB. At least a third of the saws are now idle. On the other hand, the Forest Service Ser-vice reports that social and economic econ-omic changes in the United States are reducir.g its proportionate use of timber. Uses taken over by other structural materials within the past ten years are estimated at one fifth of the present yearly cut of lumber; and in the same period the per capita cap-ita consumption of lumber seems to have passed its peak and dropped nearly one fourth. Caught with its burden of timber-land timber-land on one hand and these changes in the country's use of wood on the other, the lumber industry, the report re-port points out. has been between an j upper and nether millstone. The ; combined r5sult of an ill-adjustment of lumber production to market mar-ket requirements, with frequent, almost al-most chronic over production. Ups and downs have been the rule with most manufacturers in the south and west. Occasional years of high earnings hf.ve been followed by usually longer periods of small profits pro-fits or loss. The latter reached their climax in 1914, although 1916 brought somewhat better conditions. In the regions studied by the Forest For-est Service, U found that lumber pro- I ductiou. with local exceptions, is j .competitive, as a rule, keenly so. i Competition becomes still more vig-! vig-! J orous in its struggle between differ- I I ent regions in selling lumber in the , main consuming markets of the coun- ' j try. Lumber retailing was studied in ' all of the middle western tats only. ! In that regiun the service found it j to be eompe:uive for niost part, al- : j though its competition is less rigor-j rigor-j ous than in the case of lumber manufacturers. manu-facturers. The restraints upon trade in lumber distribution, however, in the central states studied are judged to be local rather than general, and developments in recent years have tended to increase competition. The rising cost of lumber to con-. sumers, which held generally up to 1907, is attributed by the forest ser- j vice primarily to the exhaustion of ; supplies of timber nearest to the bulk of eastern consumers, and the necessity of transporting lumber from greater and greater distances. Railroad freights now take a fifth or more of the consumers' price, retailers re-tailers about the same amount, and ; manufacturers, on the average, lit- j tie more than" one-half. The high cost of lumber is thus due in a large part to local timber shortage, result-'! ing from the rapid using up of for-1 ests without provision for their re- i newal. Other causes, according to the service, lie in the greater demand ! for specialised service made upon the retailer by the purchasing public, in higher labor costs, and in the decreasing de-creasing purchasing power of money. Since 1907, however, the effects of j over-production have been felt, and i the prices of common structural woods have made no sustained in-1 crease. The American public, the Forest Service points out, has no responsibility responsi-bility to protect the security of timber tim-ber investments or the outcome of speculative ventures. The welfare of many sections, however, depends in no small degree upon lumbering as a large taxpayer, a gigantic employer em-ployer of labor and capital, and the chief consumer of agriculture and other industries. The people of the whole country, furthermore, have a live interest in the economical use of present timber supplies' and in continued forest production after logging. The report lays special emphasis upon the fact that such waste will in the use of our national forest wealth as' is now taking place tell inevitably in the future cost of lumber, paper and other products manufactured from timber, as it is told already in many "cut out" states. Furthermore, under the present conditions, little is being done to restock the forest lands logged logg-ed for their virgin timber. The total use of wood in the United States exceeds ex-ceeds by a good deal the aggregate growth of its forests; and unless the enormous areas of cutover lands, to which millions of acres are added every year, are put to growing forests, for-ests, the Forest Service thinks that the danger of a nation wide shortage of timber and high prices for all wood products will become acute. The unstable condition of the lumber lum-ber industry, t'he report says, makes it unable to do much toward renewal of the forests which it has destroyed. destroy-ed. The experts in the Forest Service believe that a more stable kind of forest ownership, divorced from manufacture to a larger degree than now, must come about before the ills of the lumber business can be cured permanently. This kind of ownership owner-ship must not only carry the present pres-ent stocks of merchantable timber until the productive industry needs them, but also provide for the re-growth re-growth of cut-over lands. The extension exten-sion of public forest ownership, both state and national, should, in the judgment of the service, have a large part in this accomplishment. According to the service experts, there is no surplus of forest resources resourc-es above the country's needs. There is rather a lack of forests, particularly particu-larly of growing forests to take the place of the reservoirs of virgin timber tim-ber now being drained. The difficulty diffi-culty lies, says the service, in the wrong kind of forest ownership. A national mistake, the report goes on to say, was made in such rapid and wholesale passing of title to timberlands in the public domain, beyond all immediate needs for local lo-cal or industrial development. Private Pri-vate ownership, hard pressed to carry car-ry these staggering quantities of timber tim-ber during the long periods which must necessarily elapse before they can be converted into lumber, is now sacrificing them in part by wasteful use because of its own financial exigencies. ex-igencies. The carrying of this future resource, re-source, the Forest Service declares, should have been a public rather than a private function. The report urges that this situation be faced frankly and the obvious remedy applied, ap-plied, that of taking part of the western timberlands back. |