A WORLD-class commercial plant tissue culture laboratory capable of mass producing trees for the forestry industry in Walkamin is poised to secure a huge chuck of the forestry seedling market. 

The recent dramatic fall in the Australian dollar now means managed investment schemes can buy teak seedlings cheaper in Far North Queensland rather than in traditional markets of in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

Clonal Solutions Australia director Peter Radke said MIS had already flagged strong interest in buying seedlings from the company, which opened its laboratory in June 2007.

He said most tissue culture labs focused on the ornamental market and CSA was one of only a handful of labs in Australia supplying forestry timber seedlings.

"Each year MIS and major timber companies are planting 100 million tress and of that about 2-3 million are teak trees,'' he said.

"All international forestry seedling sales are done in $US so when AU$ fell from 90c to about 60c in a matter of days, it increased the cost of seedlings for these companies by 50 per cent.''

Mr Radke said MIS and forestry companies had already signalled strong interest in buying seedlings from CSA and the company was expecting orders to jump by half to a million extra seedlings.

It is already producing two million seedlings now.

He said the company was confident current the global financial crisis would not hit forestry enterprises and orders should start flooding in by early next year.

"They will still plant because of environmental issues and the government would no want them to stop planting because of carbon sequestration," he said.

To cope with the increased demand CSA is exploring the option of expanding its laboratory, which is already at full capacity with its current orders, and in the short-term an extra 10-20 staff could be employed.

"We built the lab so it could be easily expanded,'' he said.

"It has been going so well, we could start stage two within a couple of years.''

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