Innovatek reports in Friday Offcuts that this week the Australian forestry industry has been united in its opposition to an announcement made by CSIRO. After Ensis, the joint venture research grouping between CSIRO in Australia and its equivalent in New Zealand, Scion was wound up earlier this year – after only two years of operation mind you – the CSIRO Forest Biosciences group has now also been “cut off at the knees”. A reduction in this year’s Federal Budget has seen funding of A$63.4 million over four years been cut from CSIRO’s budget. The result has been an announcement that CSIRO is going to close its Forestry Division, CSIRO Forest Biosciences. Its staff and projects will be moved into three separate groups. What’s this mean? No longer has Australia’s principal research provider – nor the industry – going to have a dedicated and focussed research grouping for forestry.

So what’s been the reaction? Its been united and its been vocal. IFA National President, Dr Peter Volker said that successive governments and CSIRO itself have tinkered with the Forestry Division over the past two decades. He thought the the latest cut would be the “death knell” for a co-ordinated approach to forestry research in Australia. Timber Queensland’s CEO Rod McInnes said that the cuts would impact on the growth of Queensland’s timber industry and that he was concerned about the resulting lack of focus. A3P has called on both CSIRO and the responsible Minister, Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, to work out a way of providing an ongoing focal point for forest and wood product industry research within CSIRO. What about CSIRO? What’s been the reaction to the criticism?

CSIRO’s chief executive Dr Geoff Garrett said that because of the size of the cuts and in light of the significant reductions already made by CSIRO over the past five years that there would be an adverse impact on research. The CSIRO staff association went even further. Understandably, it expressed major concerns over the planned cuts. President of the Association Dr Michael Borgas said that the “CSIRO leadership team has seriously mismanaged the situation by allowing the cuts to impact directly on the scientific work of the agency and that the decision was lazy, knee-jerk management”. Make no bones about it, with the lack of a single focussed group dedicated to forestry, the CSIRO decision is going to have a major impact on future forestry research in Australia. Only last week IFI reported just how much the industry was worth to the economy, see story on this website. The forestry and forest products industries in Australia is worth A$19 billion annually, and it directly employs more than 120,000 people across the country! The result of the cutbacks and changed structure of course is going to be a lack of focus, a lack of coordination and a likely lack of buy-in from industry to future research initiatives. Finally, there is the very real concern that forest researchers have had a gutsful of the continual changes and will decide that they’re going to leave for greener pastures.