China’s love affair with oak a mixed blessing for France tree growers
PARIS/ BEIJING: Times are good for oak tree growers in France.
Exports of oak logs have soared and so have prices, largely because of demand from China.
Beijing banned commercial timber harvests last year and Chinese millennials have developed a taste for high-quality wooden floors and furniture from Europe.
But boom for France’s exporters could mean bust for some of the country’s 550 sawmills.
French oak producers have traditionally sold oak logs to the mills, which then cut them into lumber for making products ranging from floors and furniture to coffins and wine barrels.
But now, private forest owners have started selling logs directly to Chinese buyers because they are ready to pay higher prices and do the processing themselves.
This has left many French sawmills short of wood to process and struggling to fulfil orders.
“The problem is that oak has never been as expensive in France and we, the processors, have never had as little of it,” David Chavot, head of the Margaritelli Fontaines sawmill, said at the mill in eastern France.
Sawmills with big stocks of oak are safe for now but will face problems buying new stock because they cannot afford the higher prices, said Nicolas Douzain-Didier, head of France’s National Forest Association (FNB).
Smaller ones will lose customers and shed jobs, he said.
“The most fragile will go under, one after another,” DouzainDidier told Reuters.
About 26,000 jobs are directly linked to the oak industry in France, the world’s third largest producer. By late March, about 80 per cent of French sawmills had 30 per cent less stock than they needed to fulfil orders.
Any job losses would be politically awkward for President Emmanuel Macron, who has made reducing unemployment a priority.
The sawmill producers have appealed to him for help but a crisis meeting organised by France’s farm minister with producers and sawmill bosses in March failed to secure a compromise.
France has tried to regulate the industry by imposing an ‘EU label’ on logs coming from public forests, meaning they must be processed in the European Union.
But French sawmills say there are ways to bypass the EU label system and want a similar label applied to privately owned forests, which account for nearly 80 per cent of wooded areas in France.
For oak growers, who usually cut trees when they are from 100 to 150 years old, the price rise is a welcome rebound after a sharp fall in the late 2000s caused by low demand.
“They (the sawmills) need to live but so do we,” said Antoine d’Amecourt, who led the private forest owners who attended the March meeting with farm minister Stéphane Travert.
“Owners prefer the wood to be processed in France but they need to regenerate forests for the next generations,” he said, explaining it made little difference where the oak is processed. — Reuters