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Disintegration of the U. S. Industrial Forest Estate: Dynamics, Trajectories, and Questions

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Abstract

In the past decade ownership of the corporate forestry sector in the USA has undergone remarkable transformation. Corporate consolidation, separation of processing capacity ownership from timberland ownership, and disinvestment from timberland ownership altogether have occurred rapidly and on a global scale. Vertically-integrated forest products companies, once the standard model for publically-traded corporations, have all but disappeared. A new class of timberland investors now dominates the timberland estate. These new owners can be viewed as the most recent manifestation of capital from the core seeking rent in the distant periphery. While in this respect they resemble their industrial forestry predecessors, they differ markedly with regard to landholding objectives, time horizons, management capacities and other characteristics. This transformation has created new challenges and opportunities for other forest owners and for rural communities. Many timber processing mills have closed, restricting markets for smallholder wood. While much former industrial timberland remains in industrial-style timber management, some has been subdivided for ‘highest and best use,’ and conservation buyers have assumed control of a few large blocks. Further fragmentation of the industrial forest estate is anticipated, presenting both challenges and opportunities to small-scale forest owners and rural communities. This paper outlines the dynamics of forest ownership restructuring, posits alternative future scenarios for small-scale forestry, and points to potentially useful future research.

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Acknowledgments

Research leading to this paper was supported, in part, by the Starker Program in Private and Family Forestry at Oregon State University and by the US Department of Agriculture’s National Research Initiative Competitive Grant Program, Grant No. CSREES 2005-0711. The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of Tom Tuchman in accessing and interpreting data on timberland transactions. An early draft of this paper benefited greatly from the comments of several anonymous reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society, College of Forestry, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331, USA

    John C. Bliss, Erin Clover Kelly & Jesse Abrams

  2. Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA

    Conner Bailey & Janice Dyer

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  1. John C. Bliss
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  2. Erin Clover Kelly
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  4. Conner Bailey
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Correspondence to John C. Bliss.

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Bliss, J.C., Kelly, E.C., Abrams, J. et al. Disintegration of the U. S. Industrial Forest Estate: Dynamics, Trajectories, and Questions. Small-scale Forestry 9, 53–66 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-009-9101-7

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