Advocates of plantation forestry assert that tree farms "relieve the pressure" on natural forests. This article examines the assumptions implicit in the argument that expanding replacement forests will help preserve native forest ecosystems, and considers their validity in Chile, one of the nations most advanced in the transition from old-growth to plantation forestry. Exotic plantation forestry in Chile surpassed native forestry in production volumes in the 1960s, and has captured markets formerly supplied by Chile's native hardwoods. The economic pressure on the native forest, however, has been not relieved but exacerbated, because of the emergence of an international (mainly Japanese) market for low-value hardwood. In a world of plantations, native forests are valuable only during the lag between plantation establishment and maturation. Paradoxically, replacement forests may increase the vulnerability of native forests by relegating them to the role of a stopgap supply, alternating between overexploitation and abandonment.
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Roger Alex Clapp (2001) studied this question.