The slave-state yaller pine barons' lobby has been on our case for twenty years now, they have built up influence in Washington to the point where they were able to specifically exempt our timber from NAFTA in the fine print, thusly violating its spirit in its letter
Snowshoe, Carl, and Raymond all make good points in response, except Raymond, the name of the agreement changed to NAFTA with the inclusion of México, i believe .... also Raymond, there are all sorts of anti-trade polemicists out there, however i believe them to be in the minority on this continent, most of us recognise this rock to be a natural trading bloc with the logical perimeter being its seacoasts .... and that certainly is in the interests of the BC forestry community, whose land is perfectly suited to forestry and to little else save selling a little popcorn to the occasional turista
As it stands now, the forestry community must admit all manner of US crap completely free of duty, while its only product, the best lumber in the world, gets whacked by 32% tariffs .... unless we export the great majority of jobs in the form of raw logs to the timber barons' inefficient US mills where they maintain their slave-holding traditions by paying their workers as little as they can get away with ..... and thusly exposing yet again their hypocrisy, for if the lumber is as they claim 'subsidised' through 'too-low stumpage', then is not the raw log the vehicle of that 'subsidy', hmmm?
Pearly, your questions are good ones and deserve better response than Saturday morning time permits ... but here's a start, some background -
In the 50s and 60s there was a perception that the world was running out of wood, along with oil and metals etc, the whole Club of Rome basic theory .... so among many other things that perceived coming shortages stimulated, were planting of timber on a lot of old worked-out plantation land in the US south - there were tax advantages to putting land into timber, and in many cases they were paid by their governments to plant [speaking of 'subsidies', eh] ... well the primary species they planted, pinus taeda, called commonly yellow or loblolly pine [pino de incienso is one variety of it], grows pretty fast, they've been logging it for some time and continually climbing a growth curve of fibre production ..... meanwhile, back at the BC ranch -
We have in BC the best land on the planet for forestry - timber grows slower, straighter, finer-grained, so we have quite naturally better wood ... we make better lumber more efficiently because hey that is all we have to do here in many areas, so a great deal has been invested in industry technology, we are second to none in that regard, others copy from us in many facets of the business ..... and - we make a lot of lumber, because we've got a whole whack of that excellent land, which produces less per acre per year, sure, but we have got a lot of acres ... Snowshoe once called us the Saudi Arabia of wood, that's accurate in some respects
So the slave-state mafiosos know that on a level playing field they'd have a hard time trying to get the big money they want for their yeller pine, when even the homebuilder next door to their plantation would prefer the canadian product, which will tend to twist in place on him less, and is milled better in most cases, packaged better, delivered more predictably, more professional all round
So they will never voluntarily permit a level playing field to occur, and having more money behind them than us, along with closer connections to DC insiders, they have always and will always do what they can to stand between us and our willing customers on this continent .... there's the roots of it, and the branches, and the leaves .... later, cheers |
