By Louise Williams
Selective crossbreeding to speed the growth of trees offers a
breakthrough in meeting the increasing world demand for timber and at the
same time saving forests.
In a secure, sterile greenhouse just south of the Arctic Circle trees
are flowering in four weeks that would otherwise have taken 10 to 15 years
to mature. The genetically modified seedlings are a huge step forward in the
race to produce bigger, faster-growing trees.

It's a race which must be won to meet insatiable global demand for
wood and forest byproducts without pushing commercial logging even deeper
into the world's dwindling native forests.

"The post-fossil fuel era will see human society turn back to its
traditional dependency on wood," says Professor Ove Nilsson, the scientific
co-ordinator at the Umea Plant Science Centre in northern Sweden.

But, he says, projected demand dramatically outstrips forest
production. Soaring global consumption, especially in Asia, is colliding
with new demands on forests for carbon-neutral biofuels for electricity,
industrial furnaces, heating and vehicles.

"Everyone agrees that if we are going to solve this puzzle we have to
make commercial forests more productive," Nilsson says. "We have to grow
bulkier trees faster so we get much higher yields per hectare. Otherwise we
risk cutting down every stand of rainforest left on the planet."

In China, the forest products industry grew from $US4 billion to
$US17.2 billion in the five years to last year, paper consumption has
doubled in a decade and forests, especially in Indonesia and Russia, are
being rapidly felled to feed the Chinese industrial machine. Elsewhere,
scientists are eyeing wood for biofuels because it is at least twice as
"energy dense" as crops used to make ethanol for green vehicles, and trees
require much less land and fertiliser.

The commercial forests of the future, Nilsson says, will be
fast-growing plantations "tailor-made" for bio-energy, pulp and paper, new
wood fibre products and sawn wood and logs for construction and furniture.

And it's not all science fiction; a plant enzyme has been identified
in Sweden which makes paper highly water resistant, a potential replacement
for petroleum-based plastics, and a wood fibre composite is being tested to
replace plastic components in cars. Millions of cloned high-yield trees are
being planted in the US, following decades of research and breeding to
select the most productive trees. The most dramatic breeding gains have been
achieved in Brazil, where massive eucalyptus plantations grow to 35 metres
in seven years, a 300 per cent increase on the original Australian species.
But most trees are still only 20 to 40 per cent bigger than their ancestors.
Genetic engineering is the next frontier


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