THE events unfolding at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poland this week have major implications for Australian agriculture.

Australia is one of several nations pushing for international support to count harvested timber as a carbon sink.

At first glance this may seem a minor issue.

However, analysts are starting to realise the impact this would have on the expansion of the forestry industry and its demand for land.

Forestry companies would not only be able to sell the carbon credits accumulated in forests after July 1, 2010, but cut down the trees, sell the timber and then grow another stand of trees.

As Australian Farm Institute executive director Mick Keogh has argued, counting harvested wood as a carbon sink would supercharge the expansion of forestry industry.

Even without this change in the rules, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics estimates forestry will expand by up to 39 million hectares, depending on how rapidly the Federal Government moves to cut emissions.

Australian farmers have already spent the past decade competing with taxpayer-subsidised managed investment scheme operators for land and water.

But that competition will pale in comparison to the growth in forestry that will occur if harvested wood is counted as a carbon sink.

The proposal would seem illogical to many Australians, given the vast quantity of wood that goes into paper and eventually landfill.

The current global carbon accounting (Kyoto) rules count a harvested tree as an emission.

But that hasn't stopped the Government and the forestry industry trying to convince the rest of the world to change the rules. They've even sent research teams out to old landfill sites around Sydney to dig up copies of newspapers from the 1930s to "prove" paper can act as a carbon sink.

The reality is the Government has concluded there is little it can do to cut carbon emissions in the medium term.

So it has developed a two-pronged strategy, which includes expanding Australia's carbon sink forests and gaining credits by paying Indonesia and Papua New Guinea not to chop down rainforest.

The reality is the forestry industry already has been given the ability to write off 100 per cent of the establishment costs on plantations and access to carbon credits beyond 2010.

Why do we need to give them even more?