Foresters plan ban on supply of Kyoto data

Forest owners have been called on to support a Forest Owners' Association move to ban access to their forests or to supply information to government departments.

The Kyoto Forestry Association said yesterday the ban on data for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and Ministry for Energy had been widely supported by forest owners.

The data ban - a protest over the Government's Kyoto policy - "has Treasury and other senior government officials sweating", said the Kyoto group leader and veteran forestry investor Roger Dickie.

"Without a monitoring system in place by January 2007, the Government has no [carbon] sink credits with which to subsidise or shield large emitting industries.

"All credits the Government is allocating come from our forests because, without them, there would be no surplus credits and nothing to allocate.

"This is the largest theft of private property rights in New Zealand history and the only comparable theft of this scale in the world today would be Mugabe's land confiscation in Zimbabwe."

New Zealand's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol made possible an international government-to-government trade in "carbon sink" credits. Some estimates have said that this may give New Zealand a gain of $1.1 billion over five years from 2008, if the price of carbon credits is about $20 a tonne. However, estimates have fluctuated with changes in estimates of the size of the carbon sink.

The Government has said it will pocket the money from credits of the "Kyoto forests" planted since 1990, on behalf of the nation, as well as taking on the liabilities of the forestry sector such as the carbon "debt" incurred when wildfires destroy a "Kyoto" forest.

Dickie, a Taranaki farmer who has been packaging forestry investment schemes for 30 years, said the Government's acquisition of the "carbon credits" earned by all forestry plantations planted since 1990 had undercut expansion of the sector, leading to a catastrophic decline in new plantings.

- NZPA