China has grown rapidly in recent decades to become one of the world's largest timber producing countries and consumers of forest products, and has recently surpassed the United States in sawn wood production. The country is by far the largest producer and consumer of wood-based panels and paper. The forestry industry in Brazil is partly responsible for the country's tremendous success in the financial sector. The country has the third largest forest reserve in the world and the highest biodiversity in terms of flora and fauna.
Wood is extracted both from Brazil's native forests and from those planted commercially. Pine and eucalyptus trees are the main sources of wood volume for the country's export. Pulp, raw wood, laminated woods, plywood and paper are the Brazilian wood products that. These are shipped all over the world, generating huge revenues for the country.
Despite Growing Exploitation of Forests Around the World, North America Continues to Dominate the Timber Industry. This is partly due to the fact that the continent has vast forests, mostly conifers, relatively easily extracted. However, these forests can be left virtually unexploited, as can the more remote parts of the U, S, R Asian forests. The timber industry or timber industry is the industry that deals with forestry, logging, timber trade and the production of primary forest products and wood products (for example,.
furniture) and secondary products such as wood pulp for the pulp and paper industry. Some of the biggest producers are also among Timberland's biggest owners. Historically, the wood industry has been and continues to be an important sector in many economies. Much of this demand reflects increased consumption of industrial wood products in developing countries; however, mainly newly industrialized countries with limited forest resources have increased their imports of logs and semi-finished wood products as raw materials for export processing industries.
The world's leading timber producing countries are divided into several regional groups, each of which has distinctive characteristics of wood production and use. The trend in developed consumer countries is, therefore, a reduction in imports of logs and the processing of imported tropical logs, and an increase in imports of products with greater substitution of tropical products. In most southern European countries, timber masses have been reduced by past overexploitation or by grazing animals. Other developing countries, in particular Brazil, Chile and the newly industrialized Asian countries, are beginning to have an impact on international trade in pulp and paper products.
There is a close relationship in the forest economy between these countries; they have many genera of trees in common, and Canada is the largest producer of wood and wood items destined for the United States, the largest consumer of wood and its by-products in the world. Developing countries will assume an increasing share of this growth, although developed countries will continue to dominate the market in absolute terms. Second, the world's leading exporters of forest products still tend to be developed countries with temperate forest resources and processing industries. While the total volume of trade in tropical timber may decline, producer countries can export a greater proportion of value-added wood products and, therefore, any decrease in trade value may be less significant.
Other major Asian importers that also benefit from trade in Pacific Rim forest products appear to be the rapidly industrializing countries of P. As the available inventory of tropical hardwood in several countries declines rapidly by the year 2000, harvest levels will rapidly decline to more sustainable levels or fall even more abruptly only a few years later with inventory depletion. As noted, this market is dominated by developed countries, which account for 93% of revenues collected from exports of paper products. Germany has almost a third of its land under forest, more than most Western European countries, and this reflects poor soil conditions in the northern German plain (the Geest), where agriculture cannot be practiced economically.
The share of developing countries in world exports of forest products is just over 16 per cent, and the overwhelming majority (i). While consumer countries are forced to accept slightly higher prices and do change their consumption patterns with those high prices, tropical log prices are unlikely to flatten and decline significantly, unless greater investment in sustainable forest management can support the increase in the levels. As temperate countries seek more of their own forest resources to meet their needs and domestic consumption in tropical producing countries grows, international trade in tropical timber is likely to decline. .
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