Chair of the New Zealand Wood Council Bill McCallum told the biennial Forest-Wood conference in Wellington that the Government needs to step up in a number of areas if the sector is to reach its export earnings target of $12 billion by 2022. Source: Radio New Zealand
He said one of those problem areas is market access and to reach the target about half of the logs currently exported will need to be processed here into products, which can be sold competitively into overseas markets.
But he said the FTA with China, by far New Zealand’s biggest log market, is a barrier to that.
“New Zealand logs are exported to countries with import policies that clearly favour log imports and favour their own domestic processing industries.
“The free trade agreement we have in place with China is not delivering what it should be for the wood products industry and the China FTA, which favours logs over processed products is fundamentally flawed, and this needs to be corrected.”
McCallum said the Government needed to do more to encourage the use of wood in commercial building construction.
He said the government should adopt a procurement policy that evaluated the whole of life benefits of wood and encourages the use of wood in commercial buildings Another area in the Wood Council’s sights is building standards.
McCallum said building standards and codes need to be reviewed and rationalised as there are over 600 standards in New Zealand today each of which are over seven years old and most of which are obsolete.
He said a complicated and duplicative system of building standards is acting as an impediment to the use of timber products, particularly high value engineered timber, suitable for pre-fabrication systems.
Opposition parties have picked up on some of those concerns.
