Brazil Plywood Exports Jump 20% in August

On Sep 5, 2026

Plywood mills across Brazil shipped 183,100 cubic metres in August, 20 per cent more than in the month a 50 per cent American tariff first hit them a year earlier, and sold it at US$314 a cubic metre, 6 per cent below July. That is according to the customs records Brazil’s trade ministry publishes through Comex Stat, which closed the month’s books on Friday and shows $57.6 million of plywood shipped, up 19 per cent on August 2025.

“Brazilian wood producers have been doing their homework, investing in diversifying products and markets. But the United States is still our main customer,” Gustavo Milazzo said, with the chief executive of the export platform WoodFlow counting 24.7 per cent of everything Brazil’s wood exporters shipped this year going to that one country.

Over the first half of this year, Brazil’s plywood exports were 17 per cent below 2025 levels, with the United States taking 378,000 cubic metres, 23 per cent fewer than a year earlier, and its share of the trade slipping to 32 per cent. Mexico took 101,000 cubic metres, up 58 per cent, whilst Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Netherlands all bought less.

Brazil’s plywood buyers across the first half of 2026, compared with the same six months of 2025, in thousand cubic metres. The United States still takes a third of the trade and bought 23 per cent less; Mexico, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic were the only listed markets to grow. 2025 volumes are derived from the reported year-on-year change. (Graphic: Wood Central, from Comex Stat export records)

It comes after the 25 per cent Section 301 duty Washington placed on Brazilian goods on 22 July spared plywood, along with tropical logs, sawnwood, veneers, and most grades of pulp. The 10 per cent global surcharge those panels had carried since February expired two days later, replaced by a 10 to 12.5 per cent layer across some 60 economies, so Brazilian plywood now enters the United States at no more than 12.5 per cent, a year after carrying a 50 per cent tariff.

Pine plywood was worth $151 million to Brazil in the American market in the first half, according to WoodFlow’s reading of the same customs records, ahead of pine sawnwood at $143.3 million. One major exporter reported its American plywood shipments up 118 per cent since January as importers cleared cargoes ahead of the duty.

One month later, on 22 August, a 50 per cent duty took effect on plywood and veneered panels from Canada under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, after Ottawa and Washington failed to close a trade deal. “Overall for us, 98 tariff line items were added for forestry, which is a direct assault on our sector and on our workers here in Canada,” Derek Nighbor said, with the president and chief executive of the Forest Products Association of Canada counting Canada as the third-largest plywood supplier to the United States, a $500 million business.

Donald Trump and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva shake hands and smile in front of a blue curtain flanked by the US and Brazilian flags — US President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva meet at the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur in October 2025, before a half year in which Brazil’s plywood shipments to the United States fell 23 per cent. (Photo Credit: Ricardo Stuckert/PR, via Wikimedia Commons)

Bhavjit Thandi, chief financial officer of Richmond Plywood in British Columbia, said margins in the business run at 5 to 10 per cent at most, and that a 50 per cent charge can be neither absorbed nor passed on. Brazil’s softwood panels compete with Southern Pine plywood in the same structural market, where a 2023 market reading named the country “far and away” the largest foreign supplier.

In Europe, the Commission made its 5.4 per cent anti-dumping duty on Brazilian softwood plywood definitive on 15 April. The European Union–Mercosur agreement has applied provisionally since 1 May, and the bloc’s deforestation regulation reaches large and medium operators from 30 December, so the German, Italian, and Belgian buyers who cut their orders in half will be buying under a duty and a traceability test by the end of the year.

A barge stacked with large tropical logs is pushed along a brown river past palm-lined rainforest, with one man walking beside the load — A barge of logs on the Amazon estuary at Marajó Island, Pará, in an undated frame. The Section 301 investigation behind Washington’s 25 per cent duty named illegal deforestation and timber laundering among its findings, and the duty spared plywood. (Photo Credit: Jacques Jangoux / Alamy Stock Photo)

“You do not diversify overnight. A plywood, a moulding or a sawn board has its own specifications for each market,” Marcelo Wiecheteck said, with the head of strategic development at the forestry consultancy STCP telling the WoodFlow podcast in August that Brazil’s eight main wood export lines had lost $275 million across the first seven months of the year.

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