Other states, of course, have licensing requirements. As a professional real estate appraiser, I am a member of a professional association, but I'm also licensed by the State of North Carolina. The wood products industry is the second-largest manufacturing employer in North Carolina, second only to the textile industry. Of that, the furniture sector of the wood products industry is the largest in terms of both employment and value added. We have a potential for conflict with our state's growing recreation and tourism business, which generates 8.4 billion dollars in revenue because of the potential for large-scale change in rural landscapes.
People come to North Carolina because of our trees and our rural landscapes.
That may be the case in other parts of the state as well. I'm on an advisory committee that's looking at the situation with regard to chip mills in North Carolina, and we're dealing with data that was collected in 1989 and 1990. So we need to implement the Southern Annual Forest Inventory System regionwide. I was glad to see yesterday that we are making real progress, and I hope that all the states in the Southeast will be on that system by 2001 or 2002. We need to collect commodity drain surveys at least every two years for all products using a standardized questionnaire.