EUGENE (AP) – Exports have been one bright point for the struggling Western lumber industry as home-building remains stagnant.
Hakan Ekstrom of Seattle-based Wood Resources International tells the Register-Guard Newspaper of Eugene that lumber exports from the western U.S. to Asia were up 30 percent for the first four months of this year.
That’s giving a boost to some mills that sell overseas. But analysts say it’s a double-edged saw: Chinese buyers have mostly been buying raw logs rather than finished lumber, and that raises the costs of logs for mills that sell finished lumber domestically. Prices for finished lumber in the U.S. haven’t risen fast enough to cover the higher cost of logs for some of those mills.
Analysts say the Western lumber industry is slowly improving after bottoming out in 2009. Sawmills in 12 Western states produced 11.1 billion board feet of lumber last year, up 7 percent from 2009.
A perfect example of how our resources ,jobs,and industry are being systematically shipped overseas ostensibly to China.We need to export tables,not logs.Does China receive these favors in return for not calling in our trillions of dollars of debt to them?
carl,
No, selling trees instead of tables is how we got into trillions of dollars into debt to them and how we will get trillions more into debt to them if we don’t stop.
I checked into the macabre question of who supplies body bags and coffins for U.S. troops.While I haven’t gotten a conclusive answer yet,twenty links for suppliers popped up.All based inChina.Maybe that’s conclusive enough.