After two and a half years, Australian timber can return to China. In these days, in fact, the ban placed by China at the end of 2020, when the import of pine logs from Australian plantations had been blocked due to an infestation of bark beetles, has expired.
This decision had caused a collapse in Australian exports of this type of wood (China was its main market), reducing volumes from 3.5 million cubic metres in 2016-2020 to less than 400 thousand cubic metres in 2020.
When the ban was implemented, Australian log traders began to explore alternative destinations in Asia and, in 2021, shipped around 1.2 million cubic metres of logs to previously unimportant markets, including India, South Korea and Vietnam (as reported on the new WoodMarket Prices platform, produced by Wood Resources International). The jump in shipments to these markets was short-lived and a sharp decline occurred in 2022, partly due to increased competition from US log exporters. The decline continued in early 2023, with only 27 thousand cubic metres shipped in the first three months of the year, compared to 112 thousand cubic metres in the same period in 2022. Australia is likely to re-establish trade with China now that the ban has been lifted, but shipments are unlikely to reach past levels.
Previously, much of the pine logs Australia shipped to China were of lower quality, close to pulpwood, which was less attractive to Australian sawmills. However, Australia’s domestic industry will increasingly compete with the export market for small diameter logs as the supply of logs shrinks across the country. With the limited expansion of pine plantations over the past 30 years (0.3 per cent per annum), it is unlikely that domestic timber supply will increase in the coming decades. Moreover, many large pine plantations were destroyed by fires in 2019 and 2020 (about 6 per cent of the plantation area), which will further limit the availability of timber for domestic sawmills in the short to medium term.
WOOD RESOURCE QUARTERLY
Wood Resource Quarterly is now available as an interactive online business intelligence platform, WoodMarket Prices (WMP). The WMP tracks sawn timber, pulp, lumber and pellet prices and reports on timber trade and market developments in most key regions of the world. For more information on the WMP platform visit Global Wood Prices.
