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Exports to China to jump the next five years

Pat Bell, the new Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Innovation, talked about the important role that China will have on the B.C. economy in the future.

Bell went to China on March 26 to attend the Green Building Show, organized by that country’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development.

“There are upward of 10,000 people who attend this show, they are mostly planners, architects, engineers; the people that will be able to most take advantage of wood frame construction,” Bell said.

Bell added that China’s new five-year plan calls for an additional 36 million new affordable housing units on top of the 10 million they already build per year.

“That’s a total of 86 million housing units in China over the next five years,” Bell said, comparing to the 586,000 housing starts in the U.S. in 2010.

“It just begins to give you a perspective of what we will be able to accomplish as far as trade and wood products goes over the next number of years,” Bell said.

At the show, he was showing a three-storey, three-apartments-per floor building made from pre-fabricated and modular construction that can be assembled in three days.

“It will have, I believe a dramatic impact in the Chinese media, in terms of what they believe can be a real economic opportunity for wood-frame construction,” Bell said.

Bell said that as Interfor is one of the key players in terms of the amount of lumber that the province ships to China, and a portion is coming from the Grand Forks operation.

“What it’s really doing is opening room in the U.S. market,” Bell said.

Instead of shipping the bulk of the lumber from B.C. to the U.S. it is moving to China.

“For Boundary-type operators, similar to Interfor, that has opened up room in the U.S. market for them to occupy,” he said.

“It’s a combination of things, some of product going into China, but also opening up space for Interfor and other companies to ship into the U.S. market.”

Bell also said that B.C. would likely be seeing a rise of upwards of 20 per cent in the Japanese market, as earthquake and tsunami rebuilding efforts progress.