Demand and Supply of Wood products
In Bangladesh Electricity is very limited
largely to urban areas and upazila headquarters and it has few resources of
coal or oil to draw on. Most cooking and the boiling of rice before husking is
done over fire. Wood and bamboo are the basic materials in rural house
construction and furniture. As Bangladesh has little stone or rock, brick or
brick chippings are mainly used to construct any permanent structure. Woodfuel
is used in huge quantities in brick fields.
A FAO study revealed that the fuel wood consumption
is comparatively higher in poor countries though it varies from country to
country. Wood fuel and charcoal are used as an alternative source of high cost
of energy in urban centres. Pulpwood and bamboo are used in paper-industry
as raw materials. The consumption of fuelwood and industrial roundwood
(including pulpwood) over the 17-year period from 1993 to 2010 is shown in
Table 2.
The increasing trend of wood production (see Table
3) is attributed to the accelerated growth rate of population and concurrently
deteriorating economic condition. Nearly all rural families depend on fuel wood
for cooking their food and heating their houses (Lanly, 1982 p 62).
The largest rate of fuel wood consumption are
projected for Bhutan and Nepal due to the fact that the fuelwood is just not
for cooking but for space heating as well. Even in urban centres, owing to the
concentration of large numbers of poor households, a considerable households
use fuel-wood as their major source of energy (Openshaw, 1980 p 76 ).
Table 2 - Actual and Projected Wood Consumption,
South Asia 1993-2010
___________________________________________________________________________________
Country Fuelwood and
Charcoal
Industrial Roundwood
(1,000m3)
(1,000 m3)
1993
2010
1993
2010
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Bangladesh 31774 35012 739 852
Bhutan 1364 1575 127 110
India 262782 302387 24930 28258
Nepal 19440 22647 620 1322
Pakistan 25021 31076 2823 2351
Sri
Lanka
8703
10339
670
786
___________________________________________________________________________________
Source: Forestry Statistics Today
for Tomorrow, FAO, Rome, 1995; FAO 1997
Provisional outlook to 2010
For example, 75% of total energy consumption in
Bangladesh (Ahmad, 1987) and 76% of total energy consumption in Nepal (
Adhikary, 1988) was derived from fuel wood is recorded in 1985-86.
The general upward trend of fuelwood and small
timber consumption is heavily influenced by population growth. That is so
because fuelwood is the dominant, if not the only, energy source available to
the populations of developing countries. The question underlying the
concern is why wood fuel is being used as the major source of energy in
developing countries like Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal ?
Adhikary (1988) stated that the easy
technology of wood-fuel use and easy access to forests in developing countries
make the wood-fuel as a means of major source of energy. But Majority of
researchers in this area ( such as Openshaw, 1980; Eckholm et al., 1984;
Blakie, 1985) have showed the large scale consumption of woodfuel is related to
poverty. Poor are forced to cut trees when they don’t have any alternatives to
fulfil their minimum needs. Now the question arise: why do the poor
get the forest as their sources of livelihood ?
It is true that in most of the developing
countries, maximum populations are in the villages where they doing
agricultural work for their subsistence. For example, 840 people per km2 live
in Bangladesh - the highest population density in the world. 84% of her
total population live in rural areas where the predominant activity is
agriculture.
Excessive population pressure on available land
resources, limited availability of agricultural support services, and poor
infrastructure, have led at best to only marginal productivity of the land. The
possibility of finding job opportunities outside agriculture is at best remote.
Beset with problems of lack of money and un-availability of non-farm
employment opportunities on the one hand, and yoked in with increasing demands
for energy on the other, rural people are forced to cut trees to fulfil their
needs. The landless people are moving to urban centres where they get fuelwood
collection as a lucrative enterprise for their survival (Bowonder et al.,
1987., Sharma, 1987).
Table 3- Trends in Roundwood, Fuelwood
& Pulpwood production, South Asia (000 m3)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Country Product
1981
1985
1990
1992
1995
______________________________________________________________________
______________
Bangladesh
Pulpwood
63
76
68
69
69
Fuel
wood
23852
26224
29557
31011
3130
Roundwood
24,472
27,069
30,434 30,011
32,044
India
Pulpwood
1208
1208
1208
1208
1208
Fuelwood
190645 207685
229233
238269 274272
Roundwood
208,783
228,853
250,846
283,831 299,163
Nepal
Pulpwood
n.a
n.a
n.a
n.a
n.a
Fuelwood
13884
15566
17778
18691
20450
Roundwood
14,424
16,106
18,328
19,320 20,822
Pakistan
Pulpwood
n.a
n.a
n.a
n.a
n.a
Fuelwood
16334
18685
21923
23157 28116
Roundwood
16,919
19,770
24,102
28,259 29,665
Sri Lanka
Pulpwood
31
31
75
75
75
Fuelwood
7308
7808
8345
8562
8925
Roundwood
7,951
8,493
9,008
9,271 9,625
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Source: Data synthesized from FAO,
Forest Products Yearbook 1991,1992, 1994, 1995.
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