Now this figure undoubtedly includes some Amazonian forest which will never be logged, but any way you look at it, Brazil is the big player in native forests. A number of Southeast Asian companies have been moving into Brazil, buying up native forests and cutting rights, and this has become quite controversial. The Brazilian government is even considering regulations forbidding foreigners from purchasing forests in the Amazon basin. Currently it is estimated that Asian companies have purchased something on the order of 11 million hectares of tropical forest in Brazil. Most of the new industrial development in Latin America, and virtually all of the pulp and paper development, has been based on man-made plantations of fast growing species.
Brazil also has large areas planted to tropical pines such as caribbea and oocarpa.
However, this will serve for our purpose today, because the basic pattern has not changed since then. The dominance of Brazil and Chile makes it relatively easy to focus the rest of my talk, which will primarily discuss these two countries. No OSB production yet in Latin America, although the Brazilian company Berneck had planned to convert a small particleboard plant to OSB production, this project has been abandoned. The U.S. market is an important one for some Latin American producers. Brazil's exports to the U.S. included a wide variety of hardwood and softwood lumber and veneer, and hardwood plywood.