Lhe government must present its national plan for forest renewal (PNRF) by the end of the year, in order to remedy the worrying state of the French forest. November 6a working group of forest professionals, created following the Forest Conference in 2022, has just made proposals to the Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau. But the avenues mentioned seem questionable to us.
The need to act for the French forest is beyond doubt: tree mortality has increased by nearly 80% in ten years, part of the French forest is dying and the standing carbon stock has been decreasing for more than a decade. . So much so that we logically end up wondering whether the forest will still play its role as a carbon sink in the years to come or will, on the contrary, become a source of CO emissions.2.
However, 75% of this forest is in the hands of private owners. There are estimated to be 3.5 million of them, the vast majority of whom own very small plots of land which are not always properly maintained, due to lack of means, time or know-how. Result: 40% of private forest areas are currently not really managed.
To remedy this situation, the government is considering putting in place procedures to identify these negligent private owners. It would then be a matter of encouraging them to form forestry groups to pool their efforts or, failing that, to grant a third party structure a right of pre-emption over these forests.
A constant price of wood
Apart from the fact that it is difficult to see what this structure would be with the means to manage these millions of hectares of wood, we can question the effectiveness of this coercive approach. Because if these private owners struggle to manage their forests, it is above all due to lack of profitability.
In France, the price of wood has generally remained constant since the 1960s. Likewise, the value of forests has changed very little (around 1% of forest land is sold each year), and one hectare of forest is worth almost four times cheaper in France than in Germany.
Why this difference? Because the German forestry sector is much better organized. It is also profitable and in surplus, while ours is in deficit. It would therefore seem urgent, and useful, to us to reconsider the functioning of our forest-timber sector, and in particular the role of the National Forestry Office (ONF).
The ONF owns 25% of the French forest area and puts half of the wood production in France on the market each year. This role and this power undoubtedly need to be reviewed in depth, because this is the reason why the price of wood remains so low in France. It is not a question of subsidizing forest owners to maintain their woods, but of creating an environment in which their forests can become profitable.
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