Forest plantations covered an estimated 462 million acres in 2000, an area about the size of the timberland (forestland available for periodic harvest) estate in North America; slightly more than half of this acreage was dedicated to production of industrial wood (Table 2), with most of the rest producing fuelwood. The total plantation acreage is more than ten times the plantation area of 1980 and about 5 percent of the total forest area globally. This 5 percent accounted for about 35 percent of global roundwood production in 2000 (FAO 2001). Planting continues at a rate of about 11 million acres annually. Several scenarios developed by Brown and Ball (2000) place the plantation area by 2050 at from 396 to 579 million acres. The percent of growing stock coming from plantations is expected to rise to 44 percent by 2020 (FAO 2001), and it is likely that far more than one half of the growing stock harvest will be plantation grown by 2050.

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