Jakarta, Indonesia, February 17--Environmental investigators say they have uncovered massive timber smuggling from Indonesia's Papua province to China in what they described as the world's largest logging racket involving one wood species.
The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) said 300,000 cubic meters (more than 10 million cubic feet) of merbau wood is being smuggled out of Papua every month to feed China's timber processing industry.
Merbau is a hardwood mainly used for flooring.
"It's probably the largest smuggling case that we've come across in our time of research on illegal logging in Indonesia," Julian Newman, the group's head of forest campaigns, told a press conference.
"This illegal trade is threatening the last large tract of pristine forests in the whole Asia-Pacific region," he said.
China has become the world's largest buyer of illegal timber owing to a continued economic boom, the EIA said.
The investigation has revealed that in a just a few years, a small anchorage in eastern China has been transformed into the largest tropical log trading port in the world, the group said in its report issued Thursday.
A nearby town has become a global center for wood flooring production with 500 factories together consuming one merbau tree every minute, the report said.
The EIA said illegal logging in Papua involved Indonesian military and civilian officials, Malaysian logging gangs and multinational companies, brokers in Singapore and dealers in Hong Kong.
Syndicates pay around 200,000 dollars per shipment in bribes to ensure the contraband logs are not intercepted in Indonesian waters. Indonesia has banned the export of logs, to curb illegal logging.
"There's no denying that military officers are involved in illegal logging," said Muhammad Yayat Alfianto of the Indonesian environmental group Telapak, which worked together with the EIA in the investigation.
Sam Lawson of the EIA said merbau smuggling was worth one billion dollars a year based on the wood's value in the West.
The profits are vast as Papuan communities only received around 10 dollars for each cubic meter of merbau felled on their land, while the same logs fetch as much as 270 dollars per cubic meter in China.
"Papua has become the main illegal logging hotspot in Indonesia. The communities of Papua are paid a pittance for trees taken from their land, while timber dealers in Jakarta, Singapore and Hong Kong are banking huge profits," said Alfianto.
Indonesia is losing forest areas the size of Switzerland every year, according to the EIA.
