Forestry organization feels optimistic for future

The Council of Forest Industries (COFI) held their annual community dinner and stakeholder meetings in Prince George on Thursday. The message the organization has been getting from their members is the bottom line is no longer red and the future feels optimistic.

The lumber industry faces a different set of realities now compared to the years before the global economic crisis. The lumber sector was one of the primary casualties, in the mid-2000s, due to the collapse of the U.S. construction industry. No homes being built meant no lumber being purchased, which in turn meant sawmills and loggers and truckers in northern B.C. had their jobs seriously compromised.

However, the U.S. economy has improved a little since then, and the Asian economies have opened their doors to B.C. lumber. New technologies have allowed more to be done with B.C. wood. So the overall forest industry is feeling cautiously healthy.

"From a market perspective, the U.S. is lagging a bit behind what the predictions were - the hopes had been for 1.2 to 1.3 million housing starts this year but it will be more like 1 million instead - but that is still a positive sign there, and at the same time the Asian markets - particularly China - are very strong and we [the B.C. forest industry] are taking advantage of that diversity," said COFI president and CEO James Gorman. "It is allowing us to come out of the downturn in a different way than we could before."

The only significant impediment to overall industry success right now, said Gorman and COFI board chair Nick Arkle, a lumber executive from Kelowna, is the mid-term timber supply crunch caused by the mountain pine beetle. Their estimate was about 2022 until government-directed harvesting rates would finally stabilize.

Arkle indicated that a slow upward momentum was probably good for the B.C. industry since there was that pine shortage in effect. The capacity of B.C.'s mills is larger right now than the wood available to cut, so mills are still cutting back on production and some are closing forever. Working with nations like China, Japan and Korea to take some of B.C.'s lumber at a dependable rate, to offset the losses in the U.S., was the smoothest path for the future of the sector overall.

"We cannot afford to lose what we've gained in Asia," he said.

Arkle added that there was another sign of success creeping back into the forest industry: youth. The field of students in the province's training programs - everything from Registered Professional Foresters to architects - was experiencing a surge of renewal.

Part of the community activities for COFI each year is to award scholarships to some of the best and brightest of the new forestry generation, and have some personal contact between the industrialists and the students.