Competing Agendas?: Afforestation, Catchment Management and Indigenous Forests, c. 1910–1935

Afforestation took top priority in the minds of leading South African politicians because it helped to address two problems at once: the negative balance of trade in non-mineral commodities, and the social and economic pressures related to the mining industry, while also offering potential mitigation of the ‘poor white’ problem. National forestry strategies also focused on two other key areas: catchment management and the conservation of indigenous forests. In the minds of most South African foresters, these three policies had a coherence based on nineteenth-century ideas about the climatic importance of trees. Planting trees produced timber and supposedly moderated climate