The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) carries-out periodic reviews of the forestry sector and produces long-term forecasts of wood and wood product supply and demand. The production of reliable and timely forecasts is seen as an important aid to planning and decision making in the forestry sector at a national, regional and global level, which FAO will continue to strongly support in the future.
In contrast to previous publications on this subject, the current forest products outlook study attempts to go beyond simply presenting forecasts of future supply and demand, to look at wider issues in the markets for wood and wood products. This is why the forecasts of future supply and demand are being presented here as a working paper. They will form one component of a broader analysis, which will examine how these forecasts might be influenced by future developments in forestry policy and forest management and, conversely, what their implications are for consumers, the industry and forestry policymakers. The broader analysis will be presented as a main report, once all of the working papers in this series have been completed.
The forecasts presented here are the result of a considerable amount of work and have benefited substantially from the inputs of numerous reviewers from both within and outside FAO. In particular, FAO would like to express its gratitude to the team from the Department of Forest Ecology and Management at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), under the very capable and dynamic leadership of Professor Joseph Buongiorno, who were responsible for producing the forecasts presented here.
A major strength of the Global Forest Products Model (GFPM) is that it produces a set of supply and demand forecasts that are internally consistent. In other words, it ensures that, for each product, total world supply equals total world demand for each year of the forecast. It also ensures that the projections of supply and demand for roundwood and other raw material sources produced by the model are consistent with the projections of product supply and demand. However, it is important to note that this consistency places great demands on the quality of the production and consumption data collated by FAO. In order to produce the projections presented here, the GFPM requires a complete and consistent set of data for each of the 14 product categories in each of the 180 countries and territories included in the study. It is certainly true to say that this requirement has tested the quality of FAO's forest products data to the limit!
A large part of the analysis that has gone into this study has been to examine the quality of this data and make corrections to the data where the model has highlighted inconsistencies. The first region that was examined in great detail was the Asia-Pacific region and the data for other significant producer and consumer countries has similarly been scrutinised. However, it has simply not been possible to check, in detail, all of the 2,500 data points for internal consistency. Consequently, it should be noted that the projections presented here are best viewed in their aggregate form. For researchers interested in projections of supply and demand for individual countries, it is strongly recommended that they should contact the national forestry authorities in these countries to see if they have projections of their own, for comparison with those given here.
FAO will continue to explore with member countries, ways in which the quality of forest product production, consumption and trade data can be improved. It will also continue to produce global, regional and thematic outlook studies which provide forestry policymakers with timely and useful information to assist them with their work. In this respect, we would welcome comments on all aspects of this study from professional analysts and users of this study (contact details can be found on page vii of this working paper).
Adrian Whiteman
Forestry Officer (Sector Studies)
Forestry Policy and Planning Division
