Last June, the Federal Government dissolved the national network of 19 Private Forestry Development Committees (PFDCs), regional groups whose key objective was to put trees back into over-cleared farm land.
The philosophy behind PFDCs aligns with the concept of ‘teaching someone to catch a fish, rather than giving them a fish’ – in this case helping farmers to implement self-funded, profitable tree-growing options, rather than dispensing one-off lumps of money to plant trees. So, who is left to put the trees back on the farms now?
This strange turn of events is covered in the coming edition of Australian Forests & Timber News … out soon.
