15 



AUSTRIA AND HUN^GARY. 



AUSTRIA. 



In Austria, which has been independent of the German Federation 

 only since 1866, forestry has, in the main, followed German lines. 

 Austria-Hungary is one of the largest exporters of w^ood, and the 

 yearly exportations reach 3,670,000 tons. Germany takes more than 

 half of these exports and the rest is distributed to Italy, Russia, and 

 Switzerland. 



Austria has 24,000,000 acres of forest, of which only 7 per cent be- 

 longs to the State and 58 per cent is private land. Communal and 

 entailed forests make up the remainder. Of the private forests 34 

 per cent is in estates ranging from 20,000 to 350,000 acres in area, and 

 for the last fifty years at least 75 per cent of the total forest area has 

 been held in large, compact bodies. These large blocks are naturally 

 favorable to forest management. Private forestry is further encour- 

 aged by the system of forest taxation, which relieves forests in which 

 forestry is practiced. In' the United States there are many enormous 

 private forest holdings on which forestry would unquestionably be 

 practiced were it not that excessive or ill devised forest taxation effec- 

 tually discourages it. 



The total net revenue from the Austrian State forests is over 

 $5,000,000. The net yearly revenue per acre of 21 cents is compara- 

 tively low, due mainly to the facts that only 56 cents per acre is ex- 

 pended upon the forest and that most of the area is located in the 

 rugged Alps and Carpathians, where administration and logging are 

 costly. 



The present forest department was started in 1872 in response to a 

 popular outcry against the policy of selling State lands. That policy 

 resulted in reducing the area of State forests from 10,000,000 to a 

 little over 7,000,000 acres during the first half of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. The administration was reorganized in 1904, and now has 

 three departments — administration proper, reforestation and the cor- 

 rection of torrents, and forest protection. 



Forestry is successfully practiced on 60 per cent of all the Austrian 

 forests and on 82 per cent of the private forests, and excellent results 

 have been secured by cooperation between the State and private per- 

 s^s in forest management, particularly under the law of 1883. The 

 most conspicuous fruit of Austrian forestry, however, is the reforest- 

 ing of the " Karst.'' The Karst was a stretch of barren lands in the 

 hilly country of Istria, Trieste, Dalmatia, Montenegro, and neighbor- 

 ing territory along the shores of the Adriatic Sea. It comprised some 

 600,000 acres. For centuries it had furnished the ship timbers and 

 other wood supplies of Venice, but excessive cutting, together with 

 burning and pasturing, the evil results of clearing, and the natural 



[Cir. 140] 



