Finnish Forest Management Associations encourage an increased rate of forest thinning

The Forest Management Associations* initiated a campaign for increasing forest thinning during their promotion week on 14 — 19 April 2008. During the week the associations organized events for forest owners all around Finland. The promotion week constituted the starting shot for a campaign lasting the whole year. Its purpose is to promote thinning in Finnish family forests.

Inventories show that forest thinning must increase considerably in coming years. Thinning should be annually undertaken on a total of 470,000 hectares. Thinning promotes good forest management. The strongest demand is for domestic pulpwood. The campaign is a tool for permitting an increased consumption of domestic wood and thus for improving the raw material supply for the forest industry.

By means of the countrywide campaign for providing advice and consultancy services to forest owners the Forest Management Associations, Forest Owners' Unions and the Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners (MTK) endeavour to increase thinning. The Forest Management Associations contact forest owners in their respective districts by telephone and by letter to inform them about the need for thinning.

The Forest Management Associations' employees are professionals who know the forest owners in their own district. The associations also know the local wood market and they can help forest owners to find buyers for the wood felled in thinning. No other organizations in Finland can provide this kind of expertise.

However, a precondition for a successful campaign is that also the forest industry understands the market situation. Industry should pursue a more active purchasing policy and should increase acquisitions of domestic wood.

* The Forest Management Associations are forest owners' interest groups, which provide consulting and other services to forest owners on local level. There are 136 associations and they operate in the whole country. They have a total of more than 300 centres of operations. The associations do about 80 % of all planning and implementation of forest management operations in privately owned forests. They employ about one thousand forest management officials and 650 lumberjacks on a permanent basis.