This January 24 Japan Forest Agency put up an announcement about fitting out business enterprise for utilization of wood and wood industry framework.The point of this business enterprise is to support for new business model creation as utilizing wood fuel according to utilization of forest wood resource and forest thinnings. And the budget scale of this business enterprise is estimated roughly 5.2 million US$.

In the back ground of this business, we recognize some problems in Japan forest industry. For example, for long term we have been depending on imported foreign wood which is about 80% of all wood consumption in Japan even though rich forestry country that is covered 67% by forest in Japan's total land area. The reason why the imported foreign wood is cheaper than domestic wood price, so domestic forest industry have been weakened during long term. As a result of these, young people have gone to city to get their jobs, almost remaining people are old. And agricultural land and forest have gone into ruin, forestry and agricultural village society have been weakened year by year. Agriculture is as same as and self-sufficiency ratio of food is about 40% now.

Bcause of rising oil price and preventing warming climate, now we are going to develop for utilization of biomass fuel i.e. wood pellet, bio-ethanol.  So our government has some policy plans for utilization of biomass. This new business enterprise is composed of three parts, the first is to develop the forest industry business model of mountain side, the second is to develop the cost down and efficiency of hot water boiler, the third is to study for safety and burning efficiency of wood pellet. And Japan Wood Pellet Association is addressing to offer to get the third part business. It is safety and efficiency study and testing plan by using some kind of domestic and foreign pellets and stoves. As these our biomass pellet utilizing activity in Japan, it is just like to stand up on start line, and we shall have to challenge many difficulties on keeping safety and on developing energy efficiency of boiler(generator) plants and burning appliances.

I hope that Japan forest industry and agriculture are recovered again and also self-sufficiency ratio of wood and food become rising up at least above 70%. As a result, our association activity makes reduce CO2 emission and recover forest industry and agriculture of mountain side. In this pulse I introduced one of Japan pellet association's activities. And also I would like to say strongly that only competitive principles based on market mechanisms is not best for regional society, and also rich person or big company that has strong economy power or high technology power should make enough consideration for weak person or weak regional society.

I feel very happy if this information contributes to you wattwatters. And I will be very glad to receive and shared many good news or useful information from my friends wattwatters.