Economy, Forestry and Fishing

Environmental management and conservation have played increasingly important roles in German forestry and fishing. Forests cover 32 percent of German territory, much of it mountainous. Only 33 percent is cultivated. The forests sustain timber production and wood products, such as furniture, construction materials, and toys, that use pine, oak, elder, linden, and more valuable kinds of wood. The harvesting of timber, however, has always had to be supplemented with imports. The law requires forest owners to maintain their forestland consistently and to replant harvested and thinned-out areas. Public concern with the depletion of this resource led to the enactment of the Forest Preservation and Promotion Act of 1975 and to the progressive withdrawal of forestland from commercial exploitation. Since the early 1980s, increasing industrial pollution and automobile emissions have been blamed for a tree blight that has already affected half of the nation’s forests, causing leaves and needles to drop and slowing tree growth. This damage was discovered, on unification, to be particularly high in the forests of East Germany, since the Communist government had made no effort to control or even monitor environmental damage.

Germans consider their woodlands and forests important recreation areas, especially near cities, where they are regarded as the ideal antidote for the stresses and pollution of urban life. The states with the largest forests are Bavaria, Baden-Wurttemberg, Hessen, and Rhineland Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz), but there are also densely forested areas in the northeast and in the south of former East Germany.

The fishing industry of West Germany declined beginning in the 1970s, reflecting the expansion of other countries’ fishing zones and the consequent depletion of fish stocks in the remaining open waters. As a result, the West German saltwater fishing fleet shrank from 110 boats in 1970 to a mere 16 by the end of the 1980s. The catch shrank in the same period, netting only one-sixth of the herring, one-third of the codfish, and one-half of the salmon that had been caught in 1970. By comparison, the collectivized East German fisheries suffered smaller losses and built up a large fleet for use in the North Atlantic and the Baltic. In the early 1990s Germany’s annual catch included marine fish such as Atlantic herring, blue mussel, Atlantic mackerel, cod, and varieties of flatfish. Domestic fish production, especially of carp and trout, has increased greatly by raising the fish in ponds and by systematic fish management on rivers and lakes. Unification, however, brought major problems to East Germany’s outdated and inefficient fishing fleets and equipment. Rostock, the chief East German fishing port, has high unemployment as do several other German fishing ports along the North Sea and Baltic coasts.