:: rawblogXport ::

:: Thursday, April 01, 2004 ::

Negotiated softwood deal better than endless trade litigation, experts say By STEVE MERTL, CP
But a U.S. forest industry executive warned Wednesday even if Canada wins, American producers will simply take another shot because they're convinced Canadian exports are subsidized.

'Let me be clear on this point,' George O'Brien, senior vice-president of forest products for International Paper, told the PricewaterhouseCoopers annual forest industry conference.

'The U.S. lumber coalition is not going away and this battle will not be won in the courts.'

The warning was echoed, though maybe less pointedly, by others in a conference panel on the decades-old trade tiff that has spawned four complaints in the last 20 years by the powerful U.S. Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports, of which International Paper is a member.

The Politics of Ecology by Tracy McLellan, dissidentvoice.org
You may want to purchase some Louisiana-Pacific stock. It was the “proud sponsor” of the 25th Earth Day. For the last 17 years or so, says St. Clair, L & P “has paid the Forest Service about $1.50 per thousand board feet for the right to log cedar off the Tongass Forest in Alaska. It then sells the cedar logs to Japanese timber merchants for as much as $1,500 per thousand board feet, all without running a single cedar log through an Alaskan mill.” Alaska just by coincidence is exempt from a nationwide ban on the export of raw logs from federal lands. Separately, L & P’s patented Inner Seal siding emits deadly fumes when exposed to humidity? No problem. Just ship it off to Vietnam, Bolivia and other Third World countries. Businesses are not charitable operations, you know.

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