Wood

A union representing wood processing workers says concerns it expressed last week about the state of the wood industry have been confirmed by manufacturing figures out today.

Statistics New Zealand’s manufacturing survey reports a 0.8 per cent decline in the volume of wood and paper product manufacturing sales in the June 2011 quarter.  The sector has declined three out of the past four quarters.

New Zealand’s wood processing workers have been losing their jobs in
droves due to the exceptionally high international prices for raw logs
and there’s no end in sight says the National Distribution Union.

General Secretary Robert Reid says the record global prices makes
logs too expensive for New Zealand’s value-added wood processing
industry and more than 1100 workers have lost their jobs since 2008.

The high prices make it more attractive for wood producers to export
internationally and means domestic value-added processors lose money on
their final products. 

Robert Reid says it might be time for the government to consider
copying New Zealand’s international competitors who operate dubiously
legal two-tier pricing systems for logs – a domestic price separate and
lower than the global price which allows local processors to secure
logs. 

“All of our competing countries have that. We’re not necessarily in
the end an advocate of that except by saying if we’re not doing that,
and we’re not doing the same, then the people who lose out in new
Zealand are our wood manufacturers and the workers, who lose their jobs
because their mills are closing.”

Hundreds of jobs are feared to be at risk in the wood processing industry.

Statistics
New Zealand's manufacturing survey shows a 3.3 percent increase in the
volume of manufacturing sales in the December quarter. But bucking that
trend is a 4.2 percent drop in volume of sales in the wood and paper
products industry.

Output was also down in the previous two quarters.

The
National Distribution Union says while exporters of raw logs are making
money, value-added wood processors are being put out of business. The
union says more than a thousand jobs have been lost since 2008, and
it's worried more could go.

New Zealand's third-biggest export business, the $4 billion wood
industry, is having trouble seeing the forest for the trees right now.

Word last month of a wood processing industry
"crisis" meeting snapped us out of holiday reverie after the National
Distribution Union did its sums on job losses from major processing
mills since 2008 and produced the nasty figure of 1129.

The union, claiming the industry was at crisis point, suspected the real number was double that.

Hang on, didn't we hear before Christmas that wood exports are going
gangbusters, with the ravenous infrastructural maw of China digesting
our forests as fast as we can grow them?

Yes, but it is the logs side of the sector that is
booming. The downstream wood processing side – the $1 billion industry
that adds value to logs – is in trouble, the NDU told Forestry Minister
David Carter.

Read the full story from the Dominion Post and Press newspapers here.