Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. My name is David Lindsay. I represent Forest Products Association of Canada, and we're very pleased to be here. We thank the committee for the opportunity to present to you. The forest industry, as many of you around the table I have spoken with individually know, is a large and important part of the Canadian economy. We're in virtually every province and we directly employ some 235,000 workers. The forest industry is located mainly, as you can imagine, close to where the trees are, so in largely rural and remote communities.
We're perceived as a resource industry, which is factually correct, but most of our work happens in the mills and requires skilled and semi-skilled workers to process the wood into marketable products, so we're actually part of the manufacturing sector of Canada. We contribute 12% of Canada's manufacturing GDP. We're a sizable part of the economy both as an extraction industry of a green renewable resource and as a part of the manufacturing industry.
We went through some difficult times in the economic downturn of 2008. We actually started to slip in 2006 and 2007. The U.S. housing starts dropped precipitously and people discovered things like iPads and the Internet, so newsprint use has been dropping over the period of the last decade.
We have therefore concluded as an industry that Canada still has one of the largest and best managed forests in the world. We are a green and renewable resource, and we have something to contribute to the bioeconomy and the economy of the globe. Therefore, we embarked on something we call Vision2020 to determine how we can take advantage of the great resource we have in Canada. I won't go into a lot of detail on Vision2020. Suffice it to say we have committed to generating $20 billion of new economic activity by the year 2020. In order to do that, we need to have innovative products, new markets, and new customers looking to fill the demands of the growing, emerging middle class of the emerging markets, and we need new products to help the domestic consumption here in Canada as well.
We're a large exporter and the export agenda is a big part of our Vision2020. We've actually been quite successful in the Asian market. Canada's largest export to China today is forest products. We export about $4 billion worth of forestry products to China, and that market is continuing to grow. We're very supportive of opening up markets and additional trade to help create those jobs in rural and remote parts of Canada and help contribute to the economy, and therefore we're supportive of the Korean free trade agreement.
The challenge for the forest industry is that we have a very large diverse forest across the country, so we're trying to make sure that we're taking full advantage of it. The Korean free trade deal is very important to us and particularly in our western provinces. Last year, the Canadian forestry industry exported about $500 million plus worth of exports of wood, pulp, and paper to the South Korean market. That makes South Korea the fourth largest customer for Canadian forest products, with the United States being the largest, and China and Japan after that.
We see it as a great opportunity to continue to expand our sales into South Korea. Currently the Korean market imports $6 billion worth of forest products from around the world, and Canada is getting only about 9% or 10% of that. There's a huge opportunity for additional sales into the Korean market, but free trade agreements alone do not create sales. We need to work very hard as an industry to compete in that market, and we need the continued support of both the federal and provincial governments in our trade offices making sure that we have a good country profile and we're seen as a reliable supplier into that market.
We've got a good relationship with the trade offices and the British Columbia FIIs.We've got a good network of interactions and connections with the in-market activities of South Asia and look forward to growing them in Korea.
Another point I would have to emphasize is if you can't get the product off the loading dock to the ports, to the markets, that creates difficulties with being seen as a reliable supplier so the transportation infrastructure of Canada is very important to our trade agenda. Eighty percent of our product used to go to the United States. It was very much north-south. Now our American market exports are about 60% and our east-west trade is growing. As a country we need to think about our transportation infrastructure as part of our trade agenda. We need to continue to maintain our positive profile as a reliable country and a reliable partner. We need to continue to innovate new products and look for new ways of using the forest fibre as a green, renewable resource. The free trade agreement with Korea is very helpful to our agenda, and we look forward to making new jobs and new economic opportunity and contributing to Canada's GDP by expanding those trade opportunities.
Thank you very much.