IT HAS BEEN HEADING that way for some years. But the extent of the shift was most noticeable at the recent round of furniture trade fairs across South-East Asia, where dozens of Vietnamese-owned and foreign joint venture companies peddled their increasingly well designed and higher-value wares - almost all made from New Zealand radiata pine. While huge volumes of pine furniture pour out of China's massive factories to flood world markets, much of that production is based on pine species from other countries, notably Russia.
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