Exportation of wood products from the North American west coast to Asia was fairly uneventful until 2010 when shipment of particularly logs from the U.S. and lumber from British Columbia took off to levels not seen for almost 20 years. From 2009 to 2013, the value of logs and lumber shipped over the Pacific Ocean surged from $1.7 billion to $4.9 billion dollars. Since the record high in 2013, the total export value has fallen quite substantially and was slightly more than $3.3 billion in 2015.    

 

Customs data for the first six months of 2016 show a continued decline by 18% in the exportation value for Canada, while U.S. exports were up 3% year-over-year, as reported in the Special Report in the latest issue of the Wood Resource Quarterly (WRQ), Seattle, Wash., USA. The biggest change the past year has been the substantial decline in Canadian shipments of softwood lumber to China because of sawmills in British Columbia directing their sales to the healthy U.S. market. The export value for British Columbia lumber shipped to China in 2016 is on pace to decline by 50% as was exported in 2014. 

 

The two neighboring regions, British Columbia and the U.S. Northwest (the states of Washington and Oregon), have chosen two quite different paths regarding the mix between logs and lumber exports to Asia. The U.S. has exported mostly softwood logs valued at about 77% of the total value of shipped logs and lumber the past few years, while Canada’s major export product has been softwood lumber, accounting for slightly more than 75% of total exports in 2015 and 2016, reports the WRQ.

 

Not surprisingly, a shift in destination for North American logs and lumber has occurred the past five years. For many decades, Japan was the major consumer of forest products from the U.S. and Canada, but in 2011 China surpassed Japan as the major trading partner of wood products. In 2015, North American logs and lumber exported to China and Japan were valued at $1.9 million and $1.2 million, respectively. This "gap" between the two countries is likely to shrink in 2016.