Forestry & British Timber: New Year - new thinking?

There can be no doubt that we live in unsettling times. The past twelve months has seen a gathering tide of unrest on a number of major fronts. The fallout from the Sub-prime loans mess; the collapse of Northern Rock; with investors scrambling for their savings in a way not seen since the nineteen-thirties; the continuing friction between the western world and the international brotherhood of Islamic countries; and, the rise and rise in the price of oil, have all been played out in a world at last beginning to realise that the good times, if not yet over, could well be coming to an end.

Food prices are rising, transport costs are up. House prices are set to fall. A flu-pandemic threatens. Over us all hangs the darkening spectre of climate change, in an overpopulated world, with death and disaster in the wings.

So it would be easy to start the New Year of 2008 in gloomy mood. Don't get us wrong. The negative factors cannot be ignored. World financial markets are in a mess, but the whole edifice of capitalism has such a safety net of in-built self-interest that although we can expect cyclical setbacks, these are nothing new.

We've been through three property collapses during the thirty-year life of this magazine, but we bet most of us would find it hard to date the most recent, let alone speculate on its cause. Oil prices rocketed in the seventies; it was tough for a while, but we survived. Also, one man's meat is, apocryphally, another man's poison. Price increases mean higher profits, but they also mean inflation either through the effects of shortages or because of a rise in costs of production.

So although we might be wearing a cheesy grin at the news that home- grown timber prices are up, this has to be set against the skyrocketing costs of harvesting and haulage, as well as the ambivalent fact of the causes and likely effect of real timber shortages on a global scale.

Well, this much is sure. The Forestry Commission's Standing Sales Index shows a rise of 34.9% in real terms to September 2007, compared with the previous year. In 1996 we were ...