France’s southwest accounts for about a third of the nation’s lumber production, and forests cover about 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of Aquitaine, mostly privately owned pine. Large areas are flooded and the priority is to unblock drainage channels and roads to allow felled trees to be moved, French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier said.
The storm, the strongest in the region since 1999, killed at least 15 people in France and Spain, toppled walls, overturned trucks and closed airports in both countries. Storms in December 1999 destroyed about 4 percent of France’s forests.
“The forest business has been very badly hit,” Barnier said at a press conference in Paris. “The urgency in this crisis is to recover the affected timber. We have to recover the lumber and store it, probably for a longer period.”
About 1 million hectares of Aquitaine’s forest is pine, 95 percent of which privately owned, said Thomas Formery, head of France’s National Center for Forest Ownership, in an interview. Of that area, 300,000 hectares have been “seriously hit,” with 60 percent to 70 percent of trees felled, he said.
The Aquitaine, Dordogne and Pyrenees regions in France’s southwest account for about 30 percent of French timber, Formery said.
Barnier said earlier that the storm felled 60 percent to 70 percent of forests in the southwest region.
‘Dramatic Consequences’
Damage is estimated at more than 600 million euros ($791 million), the French Insurers’ Association said, according to Le Figaro and L’Expansion.
At least 30 million cubic meters (1.06 billion cubic feet) of timber in the Aquitaine region has been felled, said Henri Plauche Gillon, president of the Private Foresters of France federation, following a meeting with Barnier.
“The storm has had dramatic consequences for certain forested areas,” the French Ministry of Ecology said in an e- mailed statement two days ago. “The observed winds were as strong as in 1999, but due to the rain of the past days, the soil is waterlogged and the trees are even more vulnerable.”
In the 1999 storms, destruction of forests across France added about 180 million cubic meters of timber to supply, cutting the price of French lumber by about 40 percent in 2000, according to Formery.
Lumber futures traded in Chicago have dropped 32 percent in the past 12 months as the worldwide economic crisis hurts demand for construction materials.
In Aquitaine, the 1999 storms felled about 27 million cubic meters of timber. The forest organizations haven’t yet been able to assess the damage in the Pyrenees because of heavy snow, Formery said.
France imports about 5 billion to 6 billion euros of wood a year, Barnier said.