The Japanese programme to relaunch the forestry sector: matching pragmatism with sustainable development

Large forest areas mostly located in mountainous areas, extreme fragmentation of the forest ownership, inadequate forest road network and large wood imports despite the available domestic potential supply are important factors making the Japanese forest sector weak and poorly competitive. The analysis of the recent policies outlined by the Japanese Government to develop the forest sector can be very interesting, since the Italian forest sector faces similar problems and potentials. The purpose of this paper is to present the main policies contained in the “Forest and Forestry Revitalization Plan”, developed in 2009 as a part of the national Plan for the development of a New Growth Strategy. By considering the Forestry Revitalization Plan a key- element in the national economic growth strategy, the Japanese Government assigns to the forestry sector a fundamental role in achieving the well-being of the entire nation. The Forest and Forestry Revitalization Plan considers as a priority the improvement of the domestic wood demand and, at the same time, the enhancement of the domestic timber supply, through concrete policies aimed to both national and regional goals. Thanks to a parallelism with the Italian Strategic Plan for Forests and Forestry and with the Wood Chain Sector Plan, this paper highlights the strengths of the Japanese Plan and particularly, among the others, its practice settings embedded into a strong and broader ideological framework that inspires the national Plan for the development of a New Growth Strategy