Abstract

In the 1920´s and 1930´s the non-industrial private forest owners (NIFP) organised themselves into associations. The primary reason was to accomplish a stable market situation for the members’ timber deliveries and besides that to enable further development of methods for silviculture. Today, approximately 90.000 people with more than 6.000.000 hectare forestland in their possessions are associated to one of the five mayor forest owner associations in Sweden. These Associations offer their members information, guidance and education in different aspects of forest management. Apart from the service that is offered, the associations also run nighteen sawmills and three pulp industries, which gives the organisations a significant market position. In other words they are key actors when prices are negotiated and the Federation of forest owner associations (LRF Skogsägarna) have an impact on the national economic policy in forestry issues. The Swedish trade of timber products has developed from a mainly national market to a market with a substantial import from the Baltic region and Russia. At the same time, parts of the inland of northern Sweden are suffering from unprofitability in timber harvesting. In addition to these changes of supply and demand, the ownership structure is changing. Joint ownership of forest farms has become more and more common. In many cases, the income from the holding is no longer of decisive importance to the owner as they usually have an employment outside the forest farm and it has also become more common that the owners live outside the property. Previous studies have pointed out that the NIPF owners have become more and more heterogeneous and consequently it is relevant to divide the owners into subgroups. One criteria of division can be members and non-members in forest owner associations. In this paper, differences between members and non-members are examined and discussed. Results show differences in attitudes, forestry activity, knowledge and operational and administrative activity by the owner him/her self. Furthermore we argue that in order to deal with ongoing changes, it is necessary that the forest owners associations develop new strategies concerning planning and working procedures. Otherwise, the association will represent a minority of the forest owners and risk losing influence. An important issue for furthers studies should therefore to be more detailed find out how members and non-members define the aims and benefits of their forest ownership and their expectations on the forest owner associations. Based on such information, the association can develop new strategies

Published in

Conference

Joint FAO/ECE/ILO Committee on Forest technology, Management and Training Workshop on Forest Operation Improvments in Farm Forestry

SLU Authors

• Lidestav, Gun

  • Department of Silviculture, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

• Nordfjell, Tomas

  • Department of Silviculture, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Economics and Business
Social Sciences
Forest Science


Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/1428