Beyond Flexible Accumulation: Vertical Disintegration, Financialization, and the Canadianization of the <scp>US</scp> South's Forest Products Industry

ABSTRACT In his pioneering work on British Columbia's forest products industry, Roger Hayter and his colleagues compellingly demonstrated the remaking of environmental economic geographies through the shift from Fordist models of production toward “flexible accumulation.” Taking inspiration from and extending this work, I argue that the financialization of the US timber industry in recent decades has presented Canadian firms with novel avenues for flexibility. In particular, I focus on what I have termed the “vertical disintegration” of the US forest products industry since the 1990s, the result of which has been that the vast majority of private industrial timberland in the United States is either held by real estate investment trusts or institutional and private investors. For many Canadian firms, the financialization of US forestry has made it possible to evade the crises rampant in their own industry while also avoiding potential treaty issues around shipping Canadian wood into US markets. This paper draws on 60 semistructured interviews conducted with key informants between 2019 and 2023, as well as participant observation at industry conferences, and analysis of corporate annual reports and other financial and industry journalism to argue that financialization has reconfigured forest–economy relations, again around flexibility, but with different aims and outcomes than the flexibility described by economic geographers during the 1990s. In this instance, Canadian firms have managed the crises tendencies in their own industry by investing in one that—due to restructuring and financialization—increasingly became available to them.