Greenpeace Targets Illegal Logging

Sydney, Australia, April 17, 2007—Environmental group Greenpeace says China should take responsibility for illegal hardwood logging in Southeast Asia which supplied the raw materials for Chinese exports to the West, according to a report from Radio Australia.

The report said that Greenpeace’s China office says the local timber industry is complicit in the illegal felling of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea‘s merbau trees.

Logs are smuggled to China and processed and exported as floorboards and high-end furnishings to the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe.

Greenpeace says smugglers are importing banned Indonesian merbau into China using forged Malaysian documentation, and were taking logs from illegal forest concessions in Papua New Guinea.

It says China is by far the largest market for merbau, a highly prized and endangered tropical hardwood.