It’s the biggest forestry trade mission BC has ever put together according to Forestry Minister Doug Donaldson.
He along with forty other members are heading to Asia from December 5th to 14th to strengthen relations with China, Japan, and South Korea.
The Stikine MLA believes building these partnerships across the pond is crucial especially since no deal is in place with the Americans.
“We’ll continue fighting on the softwood lumber front and we know that the tariffs are unwarranted and unjust and we’re going to be fighting that action in court like we did before but that takes time.”
“We have to diversify our markets and continue that trend of diversification so we’re not singularly beholden to the Americans for our export products in wood and this kind of trade mission enables us to just build relationships and sign memorandums of understanding.”
The countries they’ll be in contact while in Asia are heavily tied to BC when it comes to exports on Softwood Lumber.
“After the US, China is our second largest market for wood, Japan is our third and South Korea is our fifth so together the Asian market represents 29% of our exports and that’s gone up considerably.”
“We’ve been working with the Chinese ministry to develop their building codes as we have lots of experience with that in BC in order to build taller wood structure buildings. In South Korea, we’ve been working with their seismicity because they’ve had a number of large earthquake events in the last few years and we have the research here to show is that wood is a good product to withstand earthquakes.”
Three memorandums of understanding will be signed in China to advance the use of wood construction with government initiatives.
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