Despite an 11% drop in America’s softwood lumber trade deficit last year, the country’s overall forest products trade imbalance continued to widen due to rising imports of other commodities, notably plywood, according to industry newsletter Random Lengths.
Softwood lumber exports in 2003 continued to fall and were just half the level of 1999. The biggest fall came in sales to Japan, which were down to just US$73m from a high of US$626m.
However, this decline has been offset by a fall in softwood lumber imports, notably from Canada. The latter were US$4.6bn last year, compared with US$6.8bn in 1999. As a result the softwood lumber trade accounted for only 44% of the US overall forest products deficit, compared to 52% in 2002.
The deficit as a whole rose 7% to US$11.7bn in 2003. For softwood plywood , the figure was more than US$241m in 2003 – double that of 2002. And plywood imports of nearly US$60m in the first two months of this year, double the level for the same period in 2003, indicate that the trade gap will widen through 2004.
