The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday edition Western Canadian lumber producers have good reason to be looking to the American South. A Bloomberg dispatch to The Globe says chased from their home forests by rising costs and a plague of tree-killing beetles, West Fraser Timber, Canfor and Interfor have been on a buying spree, doubling the number of mills they own in the South since 2009 to about 34. The Canadians are drawn by the region's 210 million acres of fast-growing forests and expanding housing markets from Texas to Virginia to Florida. Since the late 1990s, the mountain pine beetle has attacked and killed more than 700 million cubic metres of pine trees in the inland forests of British Columbia, Canada's top lumber-producing province. That is equivalent to about 700 million standard telephone poles. Warmer winters allowed beetle populations to get out of control in B.C.'s lodgepole pine forests, as well as in neighbouring Alberta and parts of the U.S. West. Billing itself as the world's fastest-growing lumber maker, Interfor last week completed the purchase of a mill in Monticello, Ark. It was the third Southern mill the company acquired this year, raising its total to nine.