ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s Tom Barlow and his associates at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) drew attention to the practice of selling timber from the national forests at a price below the costs of production.1 The NRDC argued that, among other things, the below-cost sales depressed the prospects for profitable forest ownership and timber management among private forestland owners. These claims regarding the prevalence of belowcost sales were later reinforced by studies of the timber sales program from the General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Serv ice (CRS).2 Recent Forest Service annual reports also confirm that for many national forests-the general exceptions being the highly productive forests of the Pacific Coast and the Southeast-the value of timber products sold each year is often less than the cost of timber production in the same year.3
