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Plying a Global Trade: Post-WWII Economic Reconstruction and the Invention of Southeast Asian Tropical Hardwood Plywood

Thu, March 31, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Westin Seattle Hotel, Olympic

Abstract

The tropical hardwood forests of Southeast Asia contain remarkable ecological diversity, including scores of different species of hardwood trees. This paper traces the transformation of that diverse forest into a single commodity through the development of a homogenizing technology to process it for global trade.
Industrial production methods for strong and durable plywood were perfected in the United States before and during the Second World War. Plywood manufacture, often using marginal trees and sawmilling waste, standardizes and homogenizes a naturally variable substance. Through slicing, layering, and gluing wood fiber, plywood manufacture reduces the diversity of tropical timbers into a standardized product easily recognizable by consumers. Indeed, plywood flourishes as a commodity through this reduction of wood’s material variability.
Plywood factories for Southeast Asian tropical hardwoods proliferated during the U.S.-led postwar economic reconstruction of Japan. Logs of numerous tropical hardwood species, many virtually unknown outside of local markets, were shipped to Japan from logging sites across the Malay and Philippine archipelagos. Japanese plywood factories transformed those low-cost logs into a high-value commodity for U.S. and European furniture and construction markets. Those Japanese factories were joined by similar factories in Taiwan and Korea, which the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, USAID, and other Western economic assistance programs supported on technical and economic fronts. The establishment of plywood factories as nodes for reducing the diversity of tropical forests facilitated a global trade in Asian hardwoods dependent on third-country processing of raw materials.
The species-rich Southeast Asian tropical hardwood forests were depleted with remarkable scale and speed in the second half of the twentieth century. This paper argues for the importance of plywood for understanding the patterns of depletion, which depended on the reduction of those forests’ biodiversity into a simple commodity that could be traded on the global level.

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