Abstract
After World War II, large-scale forestation was carried out to seek self-sufficiency of the domestic timber supply, and now the forest resources in Japan have matured for lumber production. On the other hand, the import of timber products, which was started to fulfill the shortage of domestic timber supply, now occupies approximately an8O%share of the domestic timber demand. The main reason for the marked dependency on the imported timber was the stable supply of equal quality products at a low cost. Under such circumstances, Japanese timber producers are faced with difficulty in increasing timber supply, because it could not meet elastically with the market change. Elasticity of the timber supply depends on the scale and stability of the forest management. In this study, we analyzed the cost for reforestation and timber production under sustainable management. We found that the total production cost in Japan is too high to be covered with the market price. We also found that even with silvicultural subsidies complete reforestation after harvesting may be financially difficult.
