Diario las Américas Newspaper, February 3, 1957, Page 25

Cuangare lumber in the drying racks at Tumaco, Colombia, to a modern town with huge plants producing tons of plywood, school desks, knock-down furniture, and prefabricated houses. Later Medi- Na organized an airlift to fly pro- visions, water, even mules into the heart of the jungle and open up a remote production center at Zoh Laguna. This was no timber raid; he replantéd the forest as he cut. Logging operations are inevit- ably carried out under the most Author looks over mahogany seedlings started in bamboo pots for ter vine, which grows throughout Central and South America and when whacked into sections fur- nishes a sweet drink to quench the thirst. Logging in the mahogany areas of Central America takes Place during the dry season, often under chocking dust conditions. Fire is a constant hazard, and there is scarcely enough water for brush- ing teeth, let alone a shower. Clearly, ingenuity is as necessary to these men as technical training, j wider variety of mixed te word slong te a Venezuelan colleague. Technicians from other areas, no matter how highly trained, must be flexible enough to adapt to new and strange conditions that con- front them in the tropical forests. 4 A plywood technician, for instance | finds his customary glue mixtures end drying schedules. entirely in- adequate. If the technical books he has brought along do not yield the f answer, he must develop new pro- cedures on his own. Despite the hazards, these opera- tions form the nucleus for inte- grated forest industries using a tropical hardwoods .than was ever thought Possible. Fiberboard, chip board, and paper pulp are the most promising products from the stand- point of using all commercial-siz- ed trees of any species as they grow in the tropical forest, rather than selective cutting of a few spe- cies. To make fiberboard, the wood is ground up, cooked, and pressed into large panels: For chip board the wood is cut into fine chips, then mixed with an adhesive and pressed into panels. While isolated plants are producing both products in México and Colombia, they are not yet integrated with other in- dustries. A pilot plant has been jset up in Aftica to experiment with the pulping of fifty mixed tro- pical hardwoods for paper produc- tion, and studies are now being car- ried out in tropical American for- ests to determine the feasibility of producing paper from raw ma- terials_ there. Perhaps the ideal combination for the widest use of . woods from the mixed forest would be integration of a sawmill with a prefabrication plant, producing ma- terials cut to specified sizes for door frames, window frames, fur- niture, and so om; a veneer and Plywood mill; chip-board and fib- ~. erboard plants; and a pulp mill. reforestation in Tumaco, Colombia. primitive conditions, demanding a durable breed of workmen and superintendents. In the cuangare swamps of Colombia, for example, the men work from boats, spending many of their working hours waist- deep in muck and returning at night to huts built on stilts in the swamp. Under such conditions, safe drinking water is hard to come by, and the workmen were delighted when I introduced them to the wa- At Colonia, Yucatan, worker morale hit a new low when the town was infested with snakes and several people were fatally bitten at night by the fer-e-lance. A Cuban friend of Alfredo Medina’s suggested that geese would get rid of the snakes. Several pairs were brought in, and soon the workers and their families could attend the evening movies un- molested. Medina, in turn, passed Bes Log pond at the Brunzeel Plywood Plant, Surinam, which makes plywood and veneer from the pale pink wood called virola. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1957 . i Such an industrial complex would require sound economic planning to protect the large capital invest: ment necessary. The timber areas would have to be large enough to pay off the investment. Location is still another consideration: the timber must be reasonably acces- sible to markets. Meanwhile* we must develop tro- pical forest management _ techni- ques to keep pace with advancing production methods. Actually, lit- tle is known about this phase: of the industry. It has not yet been determined whether it is better to convert the forest to a less com- plex pattern of growth of the more valuable species as the cutting pro- ceeds or to try to maintain the na- tural mixture. Most cutting opera- tions in the American tropics still aim at extracting a few widely scattered valuable species, leaving the forest relatively intact but without provision for reproducing ; the most valuable growing stock. It is a widespread fallacy that land supporting rich tropical forest is also rich agricultural land. A tropical forest maintains its luxu- riance by holding nutrients in a elosed cycle between the vegeta- tion and a thin top layer of the soil. When the land is cleared for agriculture, the cyéle is broken; within a year the intense rays of the tropical sun and torrential rains destroy or carry away most of the plant nutrients. Crops fail, the land is abandoned, and worth- Iess brush grows up, beginning the long process of restoring the land -to its original cover of tropical for- est. Perhaps eventually a. solution to this can be worked out by com- bining agricultural and forestry programs, so that forest trees are planted before the land is aband- oned. This is where the govern- ments come in, with land use, classification, and forest surveys. Some progress has been made with forestry management, notably at the U. S. Tropical Forest Ex- periment Station in Puerto Rico, at the Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Costa Ri- ea the Tropical Section of the Mexican Forest Department in the Yucatan peninsula, and in the forestry departments of various other American countries with the aid of Point IV forestry technic- iams. An exchange of technical in- formation on forestry problems is provided by the Sociedad Dasoné- mica de América Tropical, with headquarters in Cuba, and through such periodicals as The Caribbean Forester, published in Puerto Rico by the U. S. Forest Service, and Tropical Woods, published by the Yale School of Forestry. But the material in these publications does not always penetrate to the practi- cal working level. Tropical forestry training is available at the University of the Andes in Venezuela, the University ef Medellin in Colombia, the Na- tional University at Bogota, and at Band sawmill and lumber yard in cativo, a tropical wood once considered worthless, River, Pacific Coast Colombia. Colombians haul out mammoth cuangare trunk, raw material for the manufacture of veneer at the forest edge The author inspects cuangare logs on the banks the forestry school in Chapingo, México. Short training eoufves are held at the Tropical Forsst Ex- periment station in Puerty Rico and at various places in (entral America, organized by the Inter- American Institute. A few out- standing students receive scholar- ships for advanced forestry train- ing at universities of North Ameri- ca and Europe, but in many cases their educational preperatian is not used to best advantege lue to a lack of government ce%rditiation, None of these 4ifficulties, though, should be allowed te deter the awakening forests. The factor- ies that are springing up augur well for the economic future of tropical America. : im Barranquilla, Colombia, deals of the Chagui Bush Negro shack in Surinam logging camp Page 1