American Forestry 



VOL. XVIII MARCH, 1912 No. 3 



THE NEW ITALIAN FOREST POLICY 



By dr. GUIDO A. E. BORGHESANI 



XN his recent treatise on public forest economy, Prof. Albert, of the For- 

 est Academy of Eberswakl, gives the following summary of the prin- 

 ciples underlying the German forest policy: "to stimulate the con- 

 sciousness, in every branch of the national economy, that the real interest of 

 agriculture is synonymous with that of sylviculture." 



Now the state of affairs has been just the reverse of this up to the present 

 in Italy, as in every country whose economic development is backward, such 

 as Spain, Greece, etc. It is customary in the agricultural-pastoral class to 

 consider the forest as antagonistic to pasturage and to farming; and when 

 the Government intervened for the purpose of putting a stop to the deleterious 

 effects of this ignorant attitude, it only aggravated this sterile antagonism by 

 imposing purely negative restrictions. 



And yet for sylviculture also — as the present Minister of Agriculture in 

 Italy, the Hon. Nitti, justly remarked for agriculture — the problem is a prob- 

 lem of production. Like all problems of production, however, it is resolved at 

 bottom into a technical and organization problem. This, in fact, is the weak 

 point of Italian sylviculture, the main source of all the evils that atllict it and 

 indirectly disturb the whole of the national economy: the real reason of its 

 apparent sterility. We possess merely a modern forest technique which cor- 

 responds economically to our conditions and needs; we have not an active, 

 sound and normal forest production, on the basis of a provident and sus- 

 tained preservation. 



It is natural, therefore, that in the face of a form of production which 

 is inferior and disorganized, other productive forms which are better organized 

 and, although less modern, are steadier and more consistent, should prevail, 

 albeit in a somewhat parasitic manner. That is to say, it is natural that the 

 Italian mountaineer (and two-thirds of Italy are mountains), who does not 

 know how to estimate and utilize the intrinsic value of the forest, — the 

 maximum volume growth — should prefer to break it up for the purpose of 

 cultivating it, however badly, as long as the erosion of the soil allows him; 

 or that he should send his sheep and goats to the forest to undermine its 



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