NAFTA/TRADE DEALS: “The river that divides the U.S. and Canada in this border town also cuts directly through the Twin Rivers Paper Co.’s wood pulp and paper operation.
The two-country arrangement has worked for years in the tightly integrated operation, with a Twin Rivers Canadian lumber mill up the road supplying wood chips to a plant that turns the chips into pulp in Edmundston, New Brunswick. The pulp is then piped across the St. John River into Maine, where it gets pressed into massive rolls of paper used to make Bible pages, food packaging and shipping labels.
Today, company managers say the entire operation—including 500 jobs on the U.S. side—is at risk, threatened by a trade fight between the U.S. and Canada over the softwood logs from which the chips are collected to make the pulp. This year the Trump administration announced preliminary 27% tariffs on the lumber from Twin Rivers’s sawmill, squeezing the margins of the operation and weighing on the rest of the business.
Sawmills and timberland owners from Alabama to Oregon are eager to benefit from the higher lumber prices that come with tariffs on their Canadian competition, which they say benefits from unfair subsidies. But U.S. home builders are complaining about higher lumber prices, and American businesses, like Twin Rivers’s paper mill, that rely on raw materials from north of the border, find themselves caught in the middle.”
-William Mauldin, “In U.S. Trade Fight With Canada, the Border Watches, Warily,” The Wall Street Journal online, Aug. 21, 2017 05:30am