Yearbook^ of Agriculture 1949 



744 



DISTRIBUTION OF PRODUCTIVE ACCESSIBLE AND INACCESSIBLE CONIFEROUS AND BROAD- 

 LEAVED FORESTS BY REGIONS AND SELECTED COUNTRIES 



Accessible 



Inaccessible 



1 I hectare equals 2.47 acres. 



enough to have all or nearly all the 

 forest land in the productive category. 



Of this productive forest estate as 

 presently measured or estimated, by no 

 means all is now yielding goods for na- 

 tional and world needs. Even in the 

 advanced economy of the United 

 States, substantial areas of productive 

 forests (52 million acres) remain in- 

 accessible to use and lack transporta- 

 tion and industrial establishments. 



In many other countries and regions, 

 even higher fractions of the productive 

 forests are not usable at present or for 

 the foreseeable future. Thus, 46 per- 

 cent of Canada's productive forest area 

 is inaccessible, as is 60 percent of the 

 great forests of Brazil, 64 percent of 

 New Zealand's, and 80 percent of the 

 large productive forest areas of the 

 Netherlands East Indies. By contrast, 



a high proportion of the productive 

 forests in Europe ( excluding the Soviet 

 Union) is accessible. 



In comparison, the area of produc- 

 tive and accessible forest per person 

 for the 2.3 billion people of the world 

 ( 1.48 acres) is 50 percent of that avail- 

 able (2.96 acres) to the 146 million 

 people in the United States from her 

 own forests. 



It is clear that large areas of produc- 

 tive forest, totaling 2,862 million acres, 

 once made accessible, are still available 

 to contribute to national, regional, and 

 world needs for wood. This presently 

 unused resource represents one of the 

 great and widespread opportunities to 

 improve living standards. Only 54 per- 

 cent of the productive forests of the 

 world have been made accessible, and 

 well over half of these are in Europe, 



