USA

Like robins, Sun Belt baseball and daffodils poking their heads up from the soil, it seems to be a rite of spring for advocates of the Forest Stewardship Council and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative to go after each other about the relative credibility of each other’s forestry standards.

WASHINGTON -- Simpson Tacoma Kraft would seem like one of the greener power plants. It boils water by burning sawdust, bark and wood shavings from saw mills and pulp mills, funneling the resulting high-pressure steam into a turbine to generate electricity.

My last post generated a couple of comments that referenced FIRPTA (Foreign Investment in Real Property Tax Act) and the likely impact that the law would “keep Asian demand in U.S. timberland muted”. The law has been around since 1981 so I thought that I would take a look at what the impact of foreign investment on timberland has been to date.