Where do logs come from?

In 2024 United States produced 319.1 million m3 of industrial roundwood, 16% of the world's 2 billion m3 (FAOSTAT forestry). Brazil followed with 10%, then Russia (9.9%), China (9.8%) and Canada (5.9%). The top five together account for 52%, and 177 countries reported production, with 32% coming from outside the top ten. Sawlogs and veneer logs, the subset destined for sawmills and plywood plants rather than pulp, came to 1.1 billion m3, led by United States with 16% (FAOSTAT forestry).

Two cautions before reading that table. First, these figures are industrial roundwood only. FAOSTAT separately counts wood fuel, which is roughly comparable in volume worldwide and dominated by countries where firewood and charcoal remain the main cooking energy; including it would put a very different set of countries at the top. Second, everything here is measured in cubic meters of solid wood under bark, not in tonnes, because density varies by species by a factor of three.

The geography is a story about where the growing is easy and the transport is cheap. The southern United States, the Nordic countries, Canada, Russia, New Zealand, Chile and Brazil supply most industrial roundwood because fast-growing softwoods, radiata pine, loblolly pine, spruce and eucalyptus, can be grown in plantations on a rotation of twenty to forty years within reach of mills and ports. Tropical hardwood forests grow slowly, mix hundreds of species per hectare and sit far from infrastructure, so their contribution to volume is small even though their contribution to value per cubic meter is high.

World output changed +5% over the ten years to 2024 and +2% on the previous year. The long-run trend in volume is flat to slightly up, but the composition has shifted steadily from natural forest toward plantation, and from tropical hardwood toward temperate softwood, as log export bans and legality rules have made tropical material harder to source.

Very little roundwood is traded internationally relative to what is cut, because a log is bulky, heavy and low in value per tonne, so it is normally sawn close to where it grew. New Zealand was the largest exporter of wood in the rough (HS 4403) in 2024 with 14% of world export value, ahead of United States (14%), on world trade of $13 billion (CEPII BACI). China was by far the largest importer with 41%.

That import concentration is the defining feature of the log trade: one country buys a large share of the world's traded logs and saws them at home, which is why New Zealand radiata pine, Pacific Northwest Douglas fir and, until 2022, Russian Siberian softwood all pointed at the same destination. Policy shapes the export side more than economics does. Several tropical producers ban or heavily tax log exports to force milling at home, so a country can be a substantial producer and a negligible exporter by design. Read a low export share as a policy choice as often as a lack of forest.

There is no exchange-traded benchmark for logs, and the two series on this page are narrow. Cameroon, sapele, FOB Douala was $405.7/m³ in August 2026, unchanged from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). Its nominal high was $562.8/m³ in March 2008, and in constant dollars the real peak was $996.3/m³ in October 1978, which shows how much more valuable tropical hardwood was in real terms before substitution and supply restrictions reshaped the market.

Say plainly what these quotations are: both World Bank log series are tropical hardwood, sapele from Cameroon and meranti from Malaysia, quoted free on board at the port of shipment. They are not proxies for the softwood logs that make up most of world production and trade. A New Zealand radiata pine log delivered to a Chinese port, a Douglas fir sawlog in Oregon and a Siberian spruce log all price on entirely separate assessments, and none of them tracks sapele.

In practice logs are priced by species, diameter, length and grade at the roadside, the mill gate or the port, with the same tree yielding several price classes: a large clear butt log for veneer, smaller logs for sawing and the top and branches for pulp or chips. Buyers deduct for defect, sweep and rot, and the delivered price includes a haulage component that can exceed the value of the wood itself for a remote stand. That is why standing timber, roadside logs and delivered logs are three different prices, and why a rise in diesel prices lowers what a forest owner receives without changing what a mill pays.

Most industrial roundwood ends up as sawnwood and panels for building, so housing starts in the United States, China and Europe drive demand more than anything else. Because sawmills buy logs on expectations of lumber prices weeks or months ahead, log demand turns before construction activity does, and a change in mortgage rates transmits to the forest within a quarter.

Producing countries repeatedly restrict raw log exports to force domestic milling and capture more value. Indonesia in 1985, Gabon in 2010 and Russia in 2022 each removed a large volume from the traded market at a stroke. The immediate effect is a shortage for importing mills and a glut at home, and the medium-term effect depends entirely on whether domestic processing capacity actually gets built.

The Lacey Act, the EU Timber Regulation and now the EU deforestation regulation put the burden of proof on buyers, requiring documented and increasingly geolocated evidence of legal, deforestation-free origin. Suppliers who can produce that evidence gain access to high-value markets; those who cannot divert to markets that do not ask, which rearranges trade routes without changing how much wood is cut.

Logs are among the lowest-value dense cargoes moved by sea, so freight is a large share of delivered cost. When bulk carrier rates or diesel prices rise, the economics of shipping logs across an ocean deteriorate faster than for almost any other commodity, and trade contracts toward shorter routes.

Bark beetle outbreaks, wildfires and storms can force a large salvage harvest, flooding the market with damaged wood at low prices, then leaving a supply gap for years afterwards. Central European spruce beetle damage and North American mountain pine beetle both did exactly this, and the second half of the cycle lasts far longer than the first.

Producers sell in dollars and pay harvesting and haulage costs in local currency, so a weaker currency raises the margin on exports at an unchanged world price. Much of the year-to-year competitiveness of New Zealand, Chilean and Brazilian logs is an exchange-rate effect rather than a change in forest productivity.

Plantation supply is decided by planting decisions made decades earlier, so the volume available to cut in any year is largely fixed. Owners can bring a harvest forward or defer it by a few years in response to price, but they cannot create standing timber, which makes short-run supply unusually inelastic.

A commercial harvest starts long before the chainsaw. In plantation forestry the crop is planted, thinned once or twice to concentrate growth on the best stems, and clear-felled at a rotation age set by species and site: twenty-five to thirty years for radiata pine, longer for spruce, seven for some eucalyptus pulpwood. In natural forest management the harvest is selective, taking a small number of stems per hectare on a cutting cycle of decades, which is far more expensive per cubic meter.

Felling is done by chainsaw or by a mechanical harvester that fells, delimbs and cuts to length in one pass. Cross-cutting, deciding where along the stem to make each cut, is where most of the value is won or lost, because it determines how many high-grade logs come out of a tree. Logs are extracted to a landing by skidder, forwarder or cable yarder on steep ground, sorted by grade and species, and trucked to a mill or port.

Logs deteriorate once cut. Blue stain fungus, insect attack and end splitting all reduce value within weeks in warm weather, so logs are sprinkled with water, debarked, end-sealed or shipped quickly. Export logs are usually debarked and fumigated or heat-treated to satisfy the importing country's phytosanitary rules, which is a real cost and a real barrier.

Volume is measured under bark in cubic meters, but every country uses slightly different scaling rules and log-volume formulas, so cross-country comparisons carry a margin of error that has nothing to do with the forest. FAOSTAT harmonises what countries report, but the underlying measurement conventions differ.

Industrial roundwood splits three ways. Sawlogs and veneer logs, the larger and straighter material, go to sawmills to become the sawnwood described on the sawnwood page and to peeler lathes to become the veneer described on the plywood page. Pulpwood, smaller stems and the tops of larger ones, is chipped for pulp, paper and increasingly for fiberboard and pellets. A third stream, particle and residue wood, is milled into panels or burned for energy at the mill.

The split matters economically because the same tree supplies all three at very different prices. A mill's profitability depends on extracting as much sawlog as possible from each stem and selling the residue rather than paying to dispose of it, so chip and sawdust markets are part of the sawmilling business rather than a separate industry.

Separately from all of this, FAOSTAT counts wood fuel, firewood and charcoal, which is not included in the figures on this page. Globally it is comparable in volume to industrial roundwood and is the dominant use of trees across much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, but it is largely non-commercial and does not enter the traded market.

The chain from stump to mill is short and local, and that is precisely what makes it fragile in an unusual way: because logs cannot travel far economically, a mill closure strands the forest around it. When a large sawmill shuts, standing timber within its haulage radius loses much of its value overnight, and there is no alternative buyer within reach. Forestry regions therefore live or die by the presence of processing capacity rather than by the world price.

The seaborne trade that does exist runs on specialized handling. Log carriers and bulk vessels with deck cargo load at a small number of ports, Tauranga and Napier in New Zealand, Vanino and Nakhodka in the Russian Far East before the ban, Douala and Owendo in west Africa, and unload at Chinese ports that have built dedicated log-handling capacity. Phytosanitary treatment and inspection at both ends are genuine bottlenecks: a pest interception can close a trade lane for a season.

The single largest structural risk is regulatory rather than physical. A large share of the world's traded logs comes from countries whose export policy can change with a decree, and a large share of demand comes from markets whose legality requirements are tightening. Between the two, the volume that can legally move from a given forest to a given mill is narrower each year, and the adjustment falls on the suppliers least able to document their chain of custody.