China Now Supplies a Third of Australia’s Wood Imports Untracked
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Exclusive: Wood routed through Chinese processing provinces has reached nearly 783,000 cubic metres a year, the largest single elevated-risk pathway in the analysis, with China now supplying 30 per cent of Australia's solid wood imports.
Export logs stacked at a tropical anchorage as a bulk carrier waits offshore, the trade now supplying Australians with twice as much elevated-risk wood each year as their own native forests produce. (Photo Credit: Alamy Stock Photo, image CR8NA4)
Australia has spent three decades cutting less native forest without using less wood, and 81 per cent of the harvest it gave up has come back as imports cut in nations at elevated risk of illegal harvesting, more of it routed through China than through any other supplier. That is according to a 133-page analysis posted in full on Wednesday by University of Queensland resource economist Dr Tyron Venn, whose modelling puts twice as much elevated-risk wood in Australian hands each year as the country’s own native forests produce.
Dr Venn and his co-authors, Zuhui Huang and Jaanvi Lachhwani, fitted 27 years of trade data to a model of who supplies the wood when local production falls, work funded by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry through the five federally funded Regional Forestry Hubs. Their doubling finding covers the five years to 2022-23, measured against what Australia’s public and private native forests produced in the final year of that window, and Dr Venn put it to the Commonwealth’s eleven forestry hubs at Newcastle last month.
Tyron Venn presents the elevated-risk trade map to the Commonwealth’s forestry hubs at Newcastle on 7 July, where the doubling finding first went public. (Photo Credit: Supplied to Wood Central / Central PR Group for exclusive use by the North East NSW Forestry Hub)
Serves as a cautionary tale for the world,” reads the conclusion’s verdict on three decades of policy that, in the authors’ words, “reduced the global supply of solid wood without reducing consumer demand.” For every 100,000 cubic metres cut from native forest production, imports rise by 81,300 cubic metres in the long run, and 86.8 per cent of the replacement wood came from elevated-risk nations.
Elevated risk is a banding rather than a finding of illegality, folding every nation outside the lowest tier of Forest Trends’ Global Illegal Logging and Associated Trade Risk Data Tool into one band that basic look-up checks cannot clear. The tool scores nations on corruption, governance, conflict, and illegal export risk, and classifies China, which supplies 30 per cent of Australia’s solid wood imports, as higher risk.
Log wagons queue beneath the cranes at a Chinese rail yard, the processing economy behind close to a third of Australia’s solid wood imports and, on the report’s modelling, nearly 783,000 cubic metres a year of its elevated-risk supply. (Photo Credit: Alamy Stock Photo, image 2RK2BDD)
Nearly 783,000 cubic metres a year reach Australia through Chinese processing provinces alone, the largest single elevated-risk pathway in the report, with country of origin modelled province by province from General Administration of Customs statistics because provenance is not tracked once logs enter Chinese mills. Bilateral trade from Indonesia and Malaysia adds more than 310,000 cubic metres apiece, with Russia, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, and Africa filling out a total of 1.95 million cubic metres of elevated-risk trade.
Labelled elevated-risk flows into Australia in thousands of cubic metres a year, with via-China feedstock overlapping the China total, so rows do not sum. (Table: Wood Central, from Venn, Huang and Lachhwani)
Cameroon at 28,000 cubic metres a year, the Republic of the Congo at 22,600, Equatorial Guinea at 21,600, and Gabon at 14,900 head the African detail inside that total. Mozambique, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and eight further nations extend a Congo Basin and East African supply line that few Australian buyers would connect to their doors and decking.
Australia’s mean annual elevated-risk imports on the report’s Kepler.gl trade map, bilateral flows in red and demand routed through Chinese processing in purple. (Image Credit: Venn, Huang and Lachhwani, An Analysis of Australia’s Solid Wood Timber Production and Imports)
Supplying the elevated-risk trade requires 42,000 hectares of foreign forest harvest per year, according to the authors’ preliminary footprint calculation, and their illustrative biodiversity framework estimates that Australian demand for Indonesian and Malaysian timber costs 26 orangutans per year. That arithmetic is already contested, with David Lindenmayer and Chris Taylor publishing, last month, two decades of ABARES trade data showing imports from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea falling by 80, 94, and 91 per cent, alongside Australia’s own production.
A buyer for a Chinese trading company inspects hardwood at a log yard on Mozambique’s Beira corridor, one of the 12 African nations included in the report’s 145,900 cubic metre annual flow to Australia. (Photo Credit: Alamy Stock Photo, image EEEXT0)
No category carries more exposure than wood furniture, where 92 per cent of imports come from elevated-risk origins, and China alone accounts for 68 per cent. Engineered wood products follow at 68 per cent elevated-risk, with 43 per cent of the category from China, a supply chain reported separately today.
Builders’ carpentry reaches 70 per cent on the same measure, split mainly between China, Indonesia, and Malaysia, while 68 per cent of sawn hardwood imports carry the banding, with Malaysia the largest single origin. Sawn softwood is the exception, with 95 per cent of the category supplied by New Zealand, North America, and Western Europe, the only product line still dominated by low-risk trade.
Elevated-risk share of each import category over 2018-19 to 2022-23, with sawn softwood the only line still dominated by low-risk supply. (Table: Wood Central, from Venn, Huang and Lachhwani)
What harvest remains comes off a shrinking estate, with the net harvestable area of public native forest down from 10.2 million hectares in 1996 to 2.8 million in 2024, or 2.1 per cent of the national native estate, once Victoria and Western Australia closed their State Forests. Sawlog volumes followed the area down, from 4.0 million cubic metres a year in the mid-1990s to 1.0 million now, while imports climbed 138 per cent to 7.0 million.
Elevated-risk share of each import category over 2018-19 to 2022-23, with sawn softwood the only line still dominated by low-risk supply. (Table: Wood Central, from Venn, Huang and Lachhwani)
Softwood plantations did not fill the hole, with the modelling finding native hardwoods and plantation softwoods are “complementary goods (consumed together), not substitutes.” Atticus Fleming, the former chair of the Great Koala National Park’s Industry Panel, argued the opposite case in Monday’s Australian Financial Review, naming plantations in Australia, New Zealand, and Vietnam as the source of most replacement supply.
“Even though importers fully meet their due diligence requirements,” the authors find, fraud in international supply chains can still put illegal timber, and wood from legal deforestation and plantation clearing, on the Australian market under the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act 2012. Meeting Australian property, environmental, and labour law explains most of the local cost gap in the report’s reading, leaving mills priced out by countries carrying none of those rules.
Certified wood offers no clean exit either, with the global certified supply finite, so rising Australian demand for certified imports pushes other buyers onto uncertified wood. The paperwork gap is measurable: Source Certain testing released under freedom of information found that 37 of 74 sampled imported products were not the stated origin, species, or genus, or both.
Hand-painted origin and species codes on hardwood log ends at a Chinese-owned timber depot in Nampula, northern Mozambique, the kind of marking forensic testing found did not match the wood in half of one Australian sample. (Photo Credit: Alamy Stock Photo, image BY23FX)
Imports averaged $899 a cubic metre in real 2022 dollars across two decades, while exports, dominated by unprocessed logs, returned $160, and the 2022-23 solid wood deficit reached $5.7 billion. Adding the $1.4 billion shortfall in paper, pulp, and woodchips takes the total forest and wood products deficit to $7.1 billion, well above the $4.1 billion ABARES reported, a gap the authors trace to $2.5 billion in excluded furniture imports.
Eleven recommendations follow, from an importer levy funding a genetic and chemical reference library with rapid forensic testing, to mandatory country-of-origin labelling at wholesale and retail, to a study of an environmental tariff on legal imports produced in ways Australian law forbids. Silviculture earns its own entry, with improved management of selectively harvested forests in northern NSW and southern Queensland able to triple or quadruple production at a fraction of the cost of new plantations per hectare.
“A conservative proxy carbon credit discount,” the authors write of the 81 per cent rate, proposing it stand until embodied carbon estimates exist, and expecting those numbers to put carbon leakage higher than the timber rate. That proposal reaches the Improved Native Forest Management method at double its ceiling, with the deduction an independent assessor can apply capped at 40 per cent of net abatement.
“Likely to be negligible or negative,” runs the authors’ verdict on the net global climate and biodiversity benefit of Australia’s reduced-harvest policies, a conclusion published with federal money six days before the Senate decides whether the method built on those policies survives. Nationals senator Ross Cadell’s motion goes to the vote on Tuesday, and every senator can now read all 133 pages before deciding.
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