ABSTRACT
Latvia, Poland and Russia vary greatly in the size of their forest resource as well as their role in global forest trade. Russia contains the largest forest area of any country worldwide, amounting to 20.5 per cent of global forest cover. Latvia and Poland, in contrast, together have only about 0.3 per cent of the world’s forests. Forest product exports are important to the forest economy of all three countries, although the relative volumes of these exports vary by several orders of magnitude. Russia is a leading exporter, by volume, of primary wood products to other European countries, and is the largest supplier to China (Zhu et al, 2004).
