By now, most provinces will have disposed of the bulk of domestic timber stocks following last year's imposition of felling restrictions for forest protection reasons. There are very mixed views on the future pace of growth in China's timber imports. Analysts focus on projections of economic growth and the expansion of disposable income, especially by urban Chinese. However, a word of caution regarding the level of domestic production may be worth sounding. While domestic production will fall drastically in the short term, the unknown factor could be production from Chinese plantations.
China has huge areas of man-made forests.
The last national inventory identified 59 million hectares, with a standing volume of 12.5 billion m 3 . But problems still remain to be resolved, especially in relation to low stock volumes and yields, which are reportedly well below world norms. A concerted effort to improve plantation productivity would yield handsome results and could lower estimates of future import demand for certain types of wood products. Further complicating the picture is the question of how fast the expanded availability of domestically manufactured composite products such as MDF and OSB will generate a shi in consumer demand. Those of us who expected 2000 to be a year of recovery for tropical timber were disappointed.