The statistics of production and trade of wood products reflect goods that have historically been the main products obtained from forests, and for which there are established markets. For many forest owners and forest managers, wood products are by far the most important source of income and employment in forest industry and therefore play an important role in the rehabilitation and development of rural areas.
Over the period from 2011 to 2015, the total contribution of the forest sector to the global economy increased by 17%. In 2015, its direct contribution to global GDP exceeded $663 billion. Taking into account the overall economic effect (i.e. direct, indirect and induced economic contributions), including demand in other sectors and labor costs, in 2015 the forest sector contributed over $1.52 trillion to national economies, which is 17% more than in 2011. The largest contribution to the production of value added (31%) was made by the pulp and paper industry, followed by forestry and logging and the production of hardwood products (approximately 25% of the total value added of the sector each). Furniture production accounted for 19.6%. Asia (especially East Asia) leads in the creation of added value in all branches of the forest industry, which provides more than half of the added value in all subsectors, except furniture production.
These estimates are based on data from 62 countries, which account for 70% of the world's total forest area; their contribution to world GDP in 2015 was 94%, and they produced 93% of the world's timber, as well as 94% of lumber, 98% of paper and cardboard.
In 2020, wood products accounted for about 2.3% of the value of world exports and imports. The volume of timber trade in 2018 amounted to 2.07 billion m3, in 2019 it decreased to 2.02 billion m3, and in 2020 - to 1.98 billion m3; in the latter case, this decrease is probably due to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is estimated that in 2015, more than 19.2 million people were directly employed in the forestry sector worldwide, while its four subsectors (forestry and logging, production of lumber, pulp and paper industry and furniture production) provided approximately the same number of jobs. More than half of the official jobs worldwide were in Asia, especially in East Asia.
In 2015, for every 100 jobs in this sector, the national economy maintained (on average) 73 additional jobs. This number includes 39 jobs in the supply sectors due to links with manufacturing industries and 34 jobs in other sectors due to the expenses of employees of forest sector enterprises and their suppliers for goods and services.
Informal employment plays an important role in the labor market in the forest sector. According to FAO estimates, in those 56 countries for which relevant data were available, 7.7 million people worked informally in 2017-2019, which corresponded to 70% of the total number of people employed in the forest sector in these countries. In Asia and Oceania, the share of informal employment can reach 80% of those working in the forest sector, and in Africa – 90%.
The forest sector has demonstrated its resilience in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the global economy fell by 3.5% in 2020, and an estimated 124 million people found themselves in extreme poverty, i.e. forced to live on less than $1.90 per day. There is no empirical data that would confirm the negative or positive impact of the pandemic on the processes of deforestation and forest degradation: despite the fact that deforestation rates increased in 2020, it is impossible to attribute this to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, forests are under additional strain due to the increase in the number of people living in poverty and the increasing restrictions faced by informal producers and small and medium-sized enterprises.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on some segments of paper and paper products production turned out to be different. The production of printing paper, including newsprint, printing paper and writing paper, which has been declining by two to three percent annually since 2007, decreased by 11.8% in 2020; world imports and exports also decreased (by 13.6% and 15.9%, respectively). This sharp drop in 2020 coincided with a surge in Internet activity that was caused by the pandemic: business meetings, training and news consumption all moved online, so the demand for printing paper decreased.
The production of other types of paper and cardboard (including packaging paper and cardboard, as well as household and sanitary paper) increased by three percent in 2020, reaching 304 million tons. This increase was probably due to Internet purchases in the context of the pandemic, combined with an increase in the use of paper hygiene products in hospitals. In general, exports of wood products in 2020 decreased by 5.1%, and imports by seven percent, but during the year the volume of trade fluctuated; a sharp decline in the second quarter of 2020 was followed by a rapid rise.
Information on the state of the market after 2020 has not made significant changes to the forecasts of the production of wood products for the period up to 2050. The global model of forestry production predicts an increase in the global production of timber in the period from 2020 to 2050 by 28%, i.e. up to 2.5 billion m3. The main producers should be Europe (32% of the total volume), North America (25%) and East Asia (16%). According to the forecast, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Oceania will become net exporters and will supply their products to such regions as East, Central, South and West Asia, North Africa and Europe.
The first data from case studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the structure and volume of wood fuel production are emerging. For example, in one of the assessments of the consequences of the pandemic in Kenya, it was shown that in informal urban settlements, a quarter of households that used liquefied petroleum gas as cooking fuel before the pandemic switched to firewood or kerosene during the isolation regime associated with the pandemic. The observed trends suggest that in sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people using polluting fuels, i.e. untreated biomass (wood, plant residues and manure), charcoal, coal and kerosene, is likely to exceed a billion people by 2025.
