Forestry and the forest products sector: Production, income and employment, and international trade

Latin America is a crucial source of global forest values—whether the domestic and export values of commercial production or the global non-commercial values of forest services like carbon sequestration and biodiversity or the less-measured and generally more local contributions like watersheds and tourism. This paper reviews the extensive forest sector data for the period 1990–2020 for 19 South and Central American countries plus Mexico. Its intent is to show the larger flows displayed in the basic measures of forests and forest products, forest area and stocking, natural and plantation, certified or not, products export and domestic, in total and relative to country GDPs and population levels. The major producers, Brazil, Chile and, more recently Uruguay, are obvious. But distinctions are important for policy; distinctions within these three major producers, distinctions between the three and other Latin American countries with large forests (Argentina and Venezuela, for example), and distinctions between the generally higher income Latin American and other lower income developing countries with large forest endowments elsewhere in the world. Exports are a substantial segment of total commercial forest production for some Latin American countries and distinctions in the expected trends, the projected future, of their larger export markets are largely beyond the management of domestic policy but they too will be important to the future of the Latin American forest sector. It is these various distinctions and their implications that are the focus of this paper.