Sharing the blame: China's role in the illegal timber market

Posted by admin — 29 March 2006 at 9:00am - Comments

Timber from Papua New Guinea in a Chinese timber yard

Of China, Napoleon once said to let it sleep. When it wakes, he warned, the world will tremble. It will have escaped no one's attention that that time has almost certainly come, and as China grows in virtually every measurable way, so does its appetite for raw materials including timber.

Much of this timber comes from illegal sources in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) but it isn't just domestic consumption that's the driving force behind China's colossal timber market - developed markets in the UK, Europe, North America and Japan are encouraging China to produce wood products at ever-increasing rates.

A new Greenpeace report, Sharing the Blame: Global Consumption and China's Role in Ancient Forest Destruction, details the problem and supports the findings of the 2005 report into China's connections with the UK timber market. It also urges all parties to take decisive action to protect the world's remaining ancient forests.

Over the last 10 years, UK imports of Chinese plywood have risen by 1000 per cent

The figures are truly staggering. China's timber imports have ballooned by 450 per cent since 1995 and in the same period, exports have increased by 350 per cent. That's a hell of a lot of wood. China is the biggest customer of timber from both Indonesia and PNG, gobbling up 29 per cent and 84 per cent respectively.

Not all Chinese timber imports are illegally sourced, but when you consider that estimates peg the amount of illegal logging in Indonesia at between 76 and 80 per cent of all logging in the country, and in PNG at over 90 per cent, the scale of the problem becomes clear.

As the report's title makes clear, the blame cannot be laid wholly at China's door. Over the last 10 years, US imports of Chinese plywood went up 970 per cent but here in the UK we trumped them with a mind-blowing 1000 per cent increase. As we've revealed before, although some UK timber merchants have introduced forest-friendly policies so they don't purchase timber from dubious sources, others are blithely contributing to rainforest destruction.

About Earth Lady

Coordinator of the North Kent group and a Garden Design student

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