S2Although imports of most hardwood products have varied since 1970 with no absolute trend, imports of hardwood plywood have decreased while imports of wood furniture have increased dramatically. The decrease in plywood imports stems from the substitution of sheetrock for plywood in mobile home construction, and the substitution of domestically produced composite products for imported hardwood in the production of prefinished paneling. Increased imports of wood furniture, primarily from Taiwan, resulted from the lower cost work force augmented by the rigid exchange rate between U.S. and Taiwanese dollars. Imports of hardwood lumber, logs, and veneer have fluctuated in both volume and country of origin. These fluctuations are related to the relative strength of the domestic furniture industry and policy developments in exporting countries. S3

S2Between 1970 and 1986, hardwood log exports increased by 102 percent, hardwood lumber exports by 329 percent, hardwood veneer exports by 442 percent, and hardwood plywood exports by 61 1 percent. Much of this increase has been for white and red oak products in the European and Asian markets. The factors influencing these increases include increased cost of tropical and European hardwood products, rapid growth in European and Asian economies, and an emerging furniture industry in Taiwan. Given the ample supplies of temperate hardwood timber in the United States relative to the rest of the world, continued demand for U.S. hardwood products seems likely. However, the increase in this demand will be contingent on the value of the dollar against European and Asian currencies, growth in foreign economies, furniture production technology, and foreign consumer acceptance of substitute materials.S3.

This report presents statistical information on the production, trade, consumption, and price of timber products in the United States. Although national data are shown for the most part, some material is given for regions, States, and Canada. Preliminary data for 1979 and 1980 are indicated as such. Italic numbers in parentheses refer to the annotated bibliography on page 77.

Roelof A. A. Oldeman Tropical hardwoods are one of the essential cogs in the complex socio-economic machinery keeping alive an ever-increasing humanity with steadily rising claims upon a finite-resource environment. Their position in this context at first sight seems to be analogous to that of other commodities, such as rubber, metals, mineral oil, tropical fruits and many more. Looking closer, however, tropical hardwoods occupy a special place. Their vast majority, unlike tropical crops, still comes forth from natural forests being exploited by man. This exploitation straight from the natural resource is something they have in common with oil and metals, but the fact that they grow in living systems places them closer to crops. Natural forest ecosystems are not renewable. Timber producing trees, however, can be made into a renewable resource on condition that ways and means are found to cultivate them as a crop. be understood as a socio-economic The tropical hardwood situation can best chain, with the resource base at one end, the consumer community at the other and everything that has to do with the market in the middle. Now, at the resource side, the economics of tropical hardwood extraction barely got out of the primeval ways of wood-gathering by hand and by axe, which were still predominant in the nineteen-forties. There, the offer of natural products was so immense and so near to hand that no care had to be taken of the resource.