Russia is shipping more plywood to Turkey than it did a year ago, with August volumes up 9.5 per cent to almost 2,500 cubic metres, more than two years after Brussels found traders there re-exporting Russian birch panels into Europe. That is according to trade figures published overnight, with the month’s shipments worth US$1.5 million at an average of $615 a cubic metre, 5 per cent dearer than in July.
“This so-called forbidden importing from Russia, of course, is going on. It comes through Kazakhstan, through Turkey, through China,” Jaak Nigul, a director of the Estonian Forest and Wood Industries Association, said in February. The Tarmeko Group board member cited a packaging maker that had bought plywood from Kazakhstan for €550, while European plywood cost at least € 800.
As it stands, the European Commission’s 15.8 per cent anti-dumping duty on Russian birch plywood has applied to every shipment of the panel from Turkey and Kazakhstan since May 2024, regardless of the origin declared on the paperwork. The Commission found no economic justification for the shift in trade beyond avoiding the duty, with Russian panels paying a 7 per cent customs duty and a further 20 per cent to enter Turkey at the time.
Turkish mills could produce 17,000 to 20,000 cubic metres of birch plywood a year, the Commission estimated, yet 33,832 cubic metres of birch plywood reached the EU from Turkey in the twelve months to June 2023. “These imports could thus not be entirely constituted of birch plywood of Kazakh or Turkish origin,” the Commission’s regulation states.
The Commission tracked Russian birch plywood shipments to Turkey, climbing from 21,620 cubic metres in 2021 to 120,073 cubic metres in those twelve months, whilst birch veneer, the hardwood sheets pressed into plywood, rose from 40,096 to 109,977 cubic metres. The one Turkish producer that cooperated with its investigation was pressing birch plywood from Russian veneer, a practice the Commission ruled was itself a way around the duty.
“Thanks to this action, birch plywood from Russia, which was being shipped via Kazakhstan and Turkey to avoid customs duties, will now also be dutiable,” Jarosław Michniuk, chief executive of Polish plywood maker Paged, said when the extension was published. The Woodstock Consortium of European birch plywood makers, which counts Paged among its members, said at the time that shipments from both countries would face the duty for as long as Russian plywood did.
It comes as the Commission gave notice in February that its duty on Russian birch plywood will expire next month unless a review is opened. Turkey also sits among the 140 countries the EU rates as low risk under its deforestation regulation, alongside Kazakhstan and China, both of which are buyers that Rosleskhoz, Russia’s federal forestry agency, named for Russian lumber last year.
