Globe and Mail: China emerges as main threat to Asian forests

China emerges as main threat to Asian forests
Illegal logging for cheap plywood, furniture is destroying old-growth tracts, reports say
By GEOFFREY YORK
Friday, October 21, 2005 Page A20

BEIJING -- The world's last remaining rain forests and old-growth forests are being rapidly destroyed by illegal loggers to feed the voracious appetites of Chinese plywood and furniture exporters, two new reports have warned.

In just the past few years, China has emerged as the biggest threat to the planet's tropical rain forests, consuming nearly 50 per cent of all timber logged in threatened rain forests around the world, according to a report by Greenpeace this week.

The second report, by the London-based environmental watchdog Global Witness, documents how illegal logging for the Chinese market is decimating the old-growth forests of northern Myanmar, one of the most bio-diverse regions on earth.

Last year alone, the report said, more than a million cubic metres of timber, worth more than $250-million (U.S.), were illegally exported to China from the endangered forests in Myanmar (also known as Burma), where more than 100 Chinese logging companies with 20,000 employees have already devastated most of the old-growth forests closest to the Chinese border.

"Large tracts of forest adjacent to the China-Burma border have been almost entirely logged out," the report said. "As a result, Chinese logging companies have had to move deeper into Kachin State [northern Myanmar] to source their timber."

The illicit plunder of these forests is occurring with the "full knowledge" of the governments of China and Myanmar, which have allowed the trade to increase by 60 per cent in the past four years, the report said. On average, Chinese customs officials allow a 15-tonne truckload of illegally logged timber to cross the border from Myanmar every seven minutes, every day of the year, it said.

The timber trade was confirmed last year by a reporter who saw dozens of Chinese logging trucks in northern Myanmar, along with big stockpiles of timber. The Chinese truck drivers openly acknowledged that they were transporting the timber to China.

About half of China's timber imports are illegal, supplied by companies that far exceed the limits on their licences, and most of this illicit trade is fuelled by demand from Western countries that buy cheap plywood and furniture from China, the Global Witness report said.

China's demand for Asian timber has skyrocketed since 1998, when it imposed a national ban on logging because of the disastrous increase in soil erosion and flooding in heavily logged regions.

The Greenpeace report documents how China is importing illegal timber from threatened rain forests in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Gabon and other countries. "China is by far the largest importer of rain-forest destruction in the world," Phil Aikman, a Greenpeace researcher, said in a statement this week.

In the space of just six years, China has become the world's biggest plywood producer and exporter, the report said. Its exports soared from less than a million cubic metres of plywood in 1998 to almost 11 million cubic metres in 2004. In the same period, China has replaced the United States as the world's biggest importer of timber.