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Albania
Forests
Albania has soils and a climate favorable to an extensive lumber
industry. Although the postwar government invested heavily in
afforestation, it developed an inefficient wood products industry.
In the early 1990s, the thickest woodlands were in the central
and northern mountain ranges. The country's southern half was
mostly deforested, a consequence of the clear-cutting of oak trees
to build the merchant ships of old Venice and Dubrovnik, the destruction
of woodlands to create pastures, the burning of wood for fuel,
and the expansion of villages onto hillsides. Albania's nine state
forestry industry complexes produced an estimated 2.3 million
cubic meters of roundwood annually between 1976 and 1988; its
twenty-eight sawmills cut about 200,000 cubic meters of wood annually
between 1977 and 1988. Outdated sawmills, however, wasted raw
materials and were situated too far from sources of raw materials.
The pulp, paper, and fiberboard industries enjoyed little competitive
advantage and did considerable environmental damage. The country's
high dependency on wood for heating--amounting to 100 percent
of household energy needs in mountainous areas and over 90 percent
in the cities in 1991--contributed to the overexploitation of
forests. Unchecked cutting by people so desperate for fuel that
they hacked tree stumps to below ground level caused serious damage
to woodlands.
Data as of April 1992
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