Outsourcing Forests Costs Thousands of Jobs

Out­sourc­ing Forests Costs Thou­sands of Jobs

- by Roy Keene

Log and chip exports, con­sti­tut­ing a third of Oregon’s annu­al tim­ber har­vest, are out­sourc­ing over a bil­lion board feet of wood and thou­sands of domes­tic man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs. Yet Bar­num fails to even men­tion exports, let alone account for the loss­es. As direc­tor of the Ore­gon For­est Resources Insti­tute (OFRI), he also fails to dis­close his employer’s mis­sion and fund­ing source.

OFRI’s leg­is­lat­ed mis­sion is to “Enhance and pro­vide sup­port for Oregon’s for­est prod­ucts indus­try.” Fund­ed with for­est har­vest tax­es, OFRI ben­e­fits from increased log­ging regard­less of whether the logs are processed domes­ti­cal­ly. Does Barnum’s analy­sis omit log exports to “enhance” and “sup­port” the region’s largest cor­po­rate for­est owners?

As a pan­elist at a town hall meet­ing in New­port, I explored the impli­ca­tions of increased log exports and a pro­pos­al to great­ly expand export ship­ping from the Port of New­port. Sim­i­lar to Coos Bay’s log and chip export expan­sion, this will require dredg­ing Yaquina Bay and dra­mat­i­cal­ly increas­ing log truck traf­fic in the city’s down­town. Jeop­ar­diz­ing pro­ject­ed growth in the tourism, ser­vice and health sec­tors to add a cou­ple dozen jobs seems a poor trade for the larg­er public.

Cit­i­zens were fur­ther ruf­fled to dis­cov­er that between 2009 and 2012, the tim­ber har­vest increased 108 per­cent in Lin­coln Coun­ty while employ­ment report­ed­ly decreased. This dis­con­nect is typ­i­cal in coun­ties dom­i­nat­ed by indus­tri­al forests.

Lane Coun­ty, for exam­ple, where Wey­er­haeuser is the largest pri­vate landown­er and the region’s main log exporter, saw a 75 per­cent increase in the tim­ber har­vest from 2009 to 2012 and a con­cur­rent 14 per­cent decrease in wood prod­ucts man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs.

A fel­low pan­elist and crit­ic of esca­lat­ing log and chip exports, Greg Palle­sen, vice pres­i­dent of the Asso­ci­a­tion of West­ern Pulp and Paper Work­ers, also con­nect­ed the dots. He described the dev­as­tat­ing effects on local work­ers and com­mu­ni­ties not only from log and chip exports, but from the relo­ca­tion of entire plants over­seas to cap­i­tal­ize on cheap labor and off­shore tax breaks. They then “dump” wood prod­ucts back to us at prices domes­tic man­u­fac­tur­ers can’t com­pete with.

Guess where these out­sourced plants export logs and chips come from.

Bar­num chal­lenges crit­ics of Oregon’s for­est indus­try to “take a fresh look.” Even non-crit­ics rec­og­nize that log exports are esca­lat­ing. Gor­don Cul­bert­son, man­ag­er of Forest2Market, notes increas­ing export demands, say­ing “Asian appetite for North­west for­est prod­ucts strength­ened in the sec­ond half of 2012 and looks strong mov­ing into the New Year.” Such strength­en­ing is omi­nous for those gen­uine­ly con­cerned with local jobs and forests.

Accord­ing to the U.S. For­est Ser­vice, North­west log exports, led by Ore­gon, jumped 28 per­cent in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2013 com­pared to the first, total­ing 540 mil­lion board feet. “Demand from Chi­na is the major rea­son for the increased log exports.” said Xiaop­ing Zhou, a research econ­o­mist who com­piled the data.

Forest2Market fur­ther notes that “Russia’s mar­ket share, tra­di­tion­al­ly the largest sup­pli­er of Chi­nese logs, has con­tin­ued to erode, leav­ing Chi­nese buy­ers to fill the short­age with deliv­er­ies from North America.”

This is because Rus­sia placed a 25 per­cent tar­iff on log exports to pro­tect its domes­tic indus­try. When Rus­sia was accept­ed into the World Trade Orga­ni­za­tion, it agreed to low­er log tar­iffs to 15 per­cent. Even a 15 per­cent tar­iff helps domes­tic mills com­pete for logs and cre­ates rev­enue to off­set unem­ploy­ment and the col­lat­er­al dam­age to forests from increased logging.

Burn­ing trees for pow­er looms as a fur­ther threat to our already beset forests. The Japan­ese gov­ern­ment now sub­si­dizes mills to burn wood chips as “clean” pow­er. Sound famil­iar? Reflect­ing Japan’s grow­ing aver­sion to nuclear pow­er, the country’s wood chip demands are expanding.

A news­pa­per arti­cle by Takeshi Owa­da, “Paper mak­ers see­ing prof­it poten­tial in bio­mass pow­er indus­try,” notes that “As increased num­bers of man­u­fac­tur­ers enter the bio­mass pow­er gen­er­a­tion indus­try, they will face short­ages. Chips from their own forests will be insuf­fi­cient to ensure sta­ble pow­er gen­er­a­tion, requir­ing pur­chas­ing sup­plies from abroad.”

A coun­try that once export­ed mature tim­ber from Ore­gon now wants chips from teenage trees — trees logged off fed­er­al lands as well as private.

Oregon’s forests, less pro­tect­ed than those in Wash­ing­ton or Cal­i­for­nia, are get­ting Third World treat­ment. Oregon’s leg­is­la­tors and insti­tutes are not only fail­ing to pro­tect our forests, but con­don­ing or propos­ing poli­cies that will export more unfin­ished wood and jobs. One has to won­der whether, like Barum and the Ore­gon For­est Resources Insti­tute, our leg­is­la­tors and insti­tutes stand to be reward­ed by their efforts to increase logging!

Roy Keene is tim­ber­land bro­ker and for­est con­sul­tant in Eugene.