What Counts as Forestry and Logging in Section A?

In ISIC Rev. 5, published by the UN Statistics Division, forestry covers silviculture, forest management, and the growing of trees, while logging covers felling trees and producing roundwood and similar primary forest products. Gathering wild forest products, such as certain mushrooms or resins collected in forests, also belongs in the forestry area in broad terms. Sawmilling and wood manufacturing sit in Section C, not here.

What does growing a forest involve, year after year?

Silviculture is slow work. Trees are planted, sometimes by hand on a cleared slope, sometimes by machine across a large block. Then comes thinning: removing weaker stems so the survivors have light, water, and room to grow to a harvestable size. Tending continues between thinnings, with competing vegetation controlled and damaged trees dealt with. Decades can pass between planting and felling. A forester’s decisions in one decade shape what a logger will find in the next, and that long horizon is the first thing that sets forestry apart from annual cropping. The crop here is measured in rotations, not seasons.

How is logging different from growing?

Logging is the harvest end of the story. Felling brings trees down. Cutting shapes them into lengths. Transport moves roundwood from the felling site to a first collection point, where it can be picked up for onward movement. The work is heavy, seasonal in its own way, and far quicker than the growing that preceded it. A crew can fell in days what took decades to grow, and that asymmetry is normal in forestry. It does not make logging a separate industry from forestry in the broad sense; it makes it a distinct stage within the same primary area.

Roundwood is the key product at this stage: logs in their primary form, not yet sawn into boards or turned into paper. That primary form is the line that matters. Once logs enter a sawmill and emerge as boards, the work has crossed into manufacturing, in Section C. The sawmill’s saws, drying kilns, and grading lines belong to a factory world, even when the mill stands at the edge of the forest it serves.

What about gathering, and who does the helping?

Not every forest product comes from a felled tree. Mushrooms picked in woodland, resins tapped from standing trees, and similar wild products gathered in forests sit in the forestry area in broad terms, because they are primary products taken from the forest itself. Gathering work is often seasonal and small scale, done by people who know a particular woodland well, and it can sit alongside timber production in the same forest without competing with it directly.

Support work forms another strand. Some businesses help forest owners and loggers without owning the forest themselves, working on a fee basis: planting crews hired for a season, thinning contractors, or transport operators engaged for a specific harvest. Their work serves the forest enterprise, and the fee basis is the tell. They sell a service to the owner or logger, not the timber itself.

A pine forest, from planting to boards

Take a pine block as a thread through the whole cycle. In its early years, a company plants pine and returns to thin it, favouring straight stems and removing the rest. Over decades the stand matures. Finally a logging crew fells it and hauls roundwood to a collection point. Up to that point, every step belongs in the forestry and logging area. Then a sawmill cuts the logs into boards, and the story crosses a boundary. The boards are manufactured products, even though their timber came from the same pines. Following one block through planting, thinning, felling, and sawing shows why the classification separates stages that a single company might combine: each stage does different work, uses different equipment, and produces a different kind of output.

Why does Rev. 5 keep this area distinct?

Rev. 5 builds on Rev. 4 rather than starting afresh, with 22 sections from A to V, 87 divisions, 258 groups, and 463 classes, endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission in March 2023. Some headings were split, some merged, and some reworded as working methods changed. For forestry, that history matters when comparing figures across years: a series that changes revision may shift heading even though the trees and the crews stayed the same. Noting the revision whenever a code is quoted, and checking correspondence material before treating old and new series as one continuous line, avoids a false story of growth or decline.

This guide explains an area in general terms. It is statistical description only, and it does not settle any reader’s code, principal activity, or registration. For a formal entry, the work described here should be compared with the UNSD Rev. 5 descriptions and then confirmed with the national statistical institute or business register that holds the record.