WalMart and Louisiana Cypress Mulch: Bowing to Political Pressure
As you may have heard by now, WalMart will no longer sell Louisiana grown Cypress Mulch in its garden centers. Here are two articles in the Baton Rouge Advocate on the subject.
Wal-Mart drops state’s mulch: Coast advocates cheer store, by Amy Wold, Advocate staff writer
Sep 6, 2007, p. 1A.
Wal-Mart to stop selling cypress mulch from
By Cain Burdeau, Associated Press Writer, Associate Press, Sept. 5, 2007.
Political pressure is being applied by several so-called environmental groups. Is there a real problem cypress harvested for mulch? Well, the idea is that these trees keep the wetlands where they grow from becoming open water when they are over-harvested, or clear cut. This was certainly a problem with clear-cutting cypress a decade ago. But what is going on now?
There can be problems now, but let’s see what they are and the conditions where these problems occur.
Suppose you own some swampy low land that has cypress on it. If you harvest that cypress you may pocket the value of the cypress sold, but what happens to the value of your land? The land without the cypress is worth less than the land with it because a new owner would not be able to sell the timber. To keep from losing land value, timberland owners replant. Basically, they harvest their land at a rate so that the timber grows at about the same rate that they harvest. In other words, it is profitable to them to practice sustainable forestry. Now in the
When the landowner is the public, the incentives are different. Politicians have a hard time collecting the value from the land in the future, and they surely cannot sell it. Politicians can, however, make deals with logging companies to harvest trees from public land, and can, at times do so at values less than the values of the trees. Usually, governments regulate the logging activities on their lands, but if those regulators can be influenced with favors, bribes or campaign contributions, the regulations may not be enforced as intended.
Also, to the extent that cypress lands provide protection for the rest of us, there may be some sort of “positive externality†from growing, but not from harvesting, cypress trees. In this case, landowners may not have sufficient incentive to keep their land in the cypress growing business, and may be more likely to develop their land into other uses.
In a series of journal articles, I, along with Tom Dalton and Leon Taylor, explored how Polynesians on Easter Island over-harvested palm trees in a predator-prey type cycle (many other economists have written on this topic, starting with James Brander and Scott Taylor (1998, American Economic Review). This predator-prey cycle led to a decimation of the
What is noted in the Advocate articles is that by boycotting or by WalMart not selling cypress mulch from
My Economics 255 students will recognize that the issue with over harvesting cypress is much the same as the busted myth in our readings book by Madariaga on why recycling paper really does not save trees (pp. 81-82). The story there is clear. By recycling paper, the demand for harvesting trees for paper is reduced, reducing the price of trees and reducing the incentive that timberland owners have for planting trees, so recycling paper reduces the number of trees at any one time. By taking away the demand for cypress for mulch, as the well-meaning, but mis-informed environmentalists have done, cypress stands are likely to disappear faster than they would if mulch and other byproducts of cypress lumber could still be marketed.
-MC
September 10th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Vandersteen said. “We can buy more product from China. I can’t wait.”
-cant you just picture each peice marked “handcrafted in china”
If louisiana stop selling to out of stated companies, then louisiana makes less money. If the mulching only came from lumber companies that specialized in making mulch out of a whole trees and wasted the whole tree on mulch, I could see a bigger problem. But if I am understanding correctly, the mulch is produced as a byproduct of other items that are produced and sold. Its like wal-mart stoped selling spam. Its taking away sales that louisiana brings IN from other states. There are other states that can produce cypress, but not in abundance like louisiana.
Hopefully the state will figure out a way to counter a permenant loss of cypress to housing. If landowners do sell for housing, that would(in theory) bring more money into louisiana after years of development. More homes means more people. although then the coast may take away the homes and make houma/thibodaux Gulf front property.
The trees will still get cut down
but profit drops drastically
and mills have to deal with scraps that are usefull
Wal-mart will also see a decrease in profits. many people use cypress mulch, because its has benefits over other materials, as well as cosmetic purposes. Others use it because thats what they have allways used. They will now shop at Lowes and/or Home Depot to get what they want, and many other perks of going to a home and garden store for your garden supplies.
(A little longer than i intended)
November 27th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Like Jeremy was saying, the companies that produce mulch aren’t making all of there money from the mulch, it’s just the trash of their operations. In other words they are recylcing. As i see it, not many cypress forests will be abandoned for houssing because they companies are still making a profit from what ever else they are making.
Also, as a biology major i feel i must say that the purpose for recycling is not to save trees. Saving trees is fun and all but there are other reason to recycle. For example, recycling metals greatly reduces the initial cost of extracting and processing the metal into a usable state. It also reduces the amount of space that we’ll need for landfills. Maybe we could use the potential landfill space for houses instead of cutting down our pretty forests.