Prince George, B.C.-  It could be just another three years before B.C. is exporting enough wood to China to  reduce our dependency on the U.S. markets.

“We have already made significant increases in the volumes we are moving off shore” says Miniser of Forests and Range Pat Bell “Combine China with Japan this year and we will be 3 and ¼  or 3 ½ billion board feet. Each Carrier Lumber sized sawmill produces about 215 million board feet, so if you do the math, you’re talking about the potential of 13, or 14 sawmills production going to Japan and China.”

He says Japan has historically taken about a billion board feet each year and this year China will be on pace to take about 2.5 billion board feet.

“We’re up about 60% this year in exports to China. We did about 1.6 billion board feet last year into China, the interim goal for next year is 4 billion board feet. We’ve got a couple of moves we’re making right now that I think will allow us to achieve that.” Bell admits that sounds like extraordinary growth to go from 2.5 to 4 billion board feet in a year but he expects good news to come this fall “ I am going back ( to China) at the end of October early November, and we’ve got some pretty aggressive things that we’ve done that will play out during that period of time that I think will give us another bump into sales in China.”

It won’t be too long before the Softwood Lumber agreement is back on the radar, and Bell says he hopes exports to Asia are very healthy by that time “ 2013 is the expiration of the Softwood lumber agreement with the U.S. and my goal is to get us to 6 billion board feet into China by 2013. You add that 6 to the one billion to Japan and that’s about half our production and that puts us in a far different negotiating position with the Americans.”

He says that kind of export to China will put B.C. in a position that it will no longer rely on the American markets and it will create a balance of export markets for B.C..