China Protects Domestic Timber while Smuggling Rar
Nanxun, China, March 1--China's voracious appetite for timber is threatening exotic forests as far away as Brazil, West Africa, Indonesia and Russia's Far East.
Much of the timber bound for Chinese sawmills comes from countries where illegal logging is rampant. Environmental groups are sounding an alarm, saying the trade in illegal timber fosters corruption and encourages the devastation of some of the globe's most fragile regions.
In a report last month, one watchdog group described China as "the largest buyer of stolen timber in the world."
The British based Environmental Investigation Agency said it had uncovered "the world's biggest timber smuggling racket" - a route controlled by crime syndicates that send some 20 shiploads a month of exotic hardwood logs from Indonesia to China.
The issue reaches all the way to U.S. retail showrooms, where cheap Chinese bedroom furniture has made dramatic inroads. In November, the Bush administration slapped tariffs on China, charging that wooden furniture is being "dumped" below cost on the U.S. market.
While many U.S. consumers don't bother to ask - or don't care - about the source of wood products, ecology experts say rampant illegal logging is having a dramatic impact on places such as Indonesia, site of the last big undisturbed forest wilderness in the Asia-Pacific region. The logging destroys habitat for myriad species, including some that are facing extinction and exposes local people to landslides and floods.
China's timber imports were relatively modest in 1998, when devastating floods along the Yangtze River killed some 2,500 people. Experts blamed the floods on deforestation. As a result, China banned logging in natural forests. It turned to foreign timber, removing tariffs and promoting wood-processing industries.
Since then, Chinese imports of logs, semi-processed wood and forest products have nearly tripled, turning small cities such as Nanxun in coastal Zhejiang province into export hubs with a global reach.
Jiang Miaogen, a section chief with the Zhejiang Province Office for Industry and Commerce, smiled as he described the emergence of 370 private factories to make wood flooring in Nanxun, a canal port 60 miles west of Shanghai.
"All these companies have developed very rapidly over the last three to five years," Jiang said.
Chinese officials insist that timber coming into the country is checked by customs officials to make certain it's legal. They add that timber-exporting countries should take responsibility for safeguarding their forests.
"They are better suited to monitor the situation than the Chinese government. China doesn't have any instrument to take action," said Xu Jintao, a scholar at the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, a part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Several environmentalists said China's laws are routinely flouted.
"At the policy level, they always say, `We will try to step up efforts to tackle smuggling.' But actually there is such a huge need for timber. The local customs officials keep one eye open and one eye closed," said Wen Bo, a Beijing-based expert with Pacific Environment, a U.S. advocacy group.
Some experts say China is a part of a lengthy chain in which illegal logs are "laundered" on the way to market. Once hewn, the logs are transported on the high seas and given forged papers, processed in China, then exported to Western markets or purchased by Chinese consumers.
In its Feb. 17 report, the Environmental Investigation Agency estimated that 44 percent of China's timber imports are illegal. Other watchdog groups have said that between a third and a half of China's timber imports were logged illegally.
The U.S. timber industry, often at odds with environmentalists, agrees that the problem is serious.
