China Role Seen in Illegal Timber Trade

Global demand for cheap consumer wood products has turned China into the center of a thriving illegal timber trade that is wiping out some of the world’s most endangered forests, the environmental group Greenpeace charged Tuesday.

Recent restrictions on logging in China have prompted Chinese companies to seek lumber from neighboring Asian and Pacific Rim nations, particularly Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. As a result, Greenpeace says in a new report, China has become the world’s largest importer of tropical wood, much of it logged illegally, and the majority of it converted to wood products sold in international markets.

China imported about 158 million cubic yards of wood in 2004, according to the report. About 27 million cubic yards were consumed domestically; the remainder was exported as wood products to the United States, Europe and other markets, according to Greenpeace.

At the current rate of logging, the report said, the lowland rain forests of Indonesia could vanish by 2010.

“Illegal logging is rampant in many of the countries that supply China with wood and this destructive trade is fueling the global forest crisis,” said Sze Pang Cheung, deputy campaign director for Greenpeace China.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Tuesday that the government had been consistently opposed to illegal logging and that China was not responsible for solving the problem alone.

“It is not the issue of any single country or a particular region,” Qin said. “To combat illegal logging and the trade in this regard is the common responsibility of all countries.”

Illegal timber is often smuggled into China using fake documentation, according to the Greenpeace investigation. Some of the thick tropical logs are simply piled high at a port on the east coast of China, with the cellphone numbers of sellers painted on the trunks, Greenpeace said. Buyers tend to be small or medium-sized family-run businesses that turn the logs into plywood, veneer and other furniture and flooring materials, it said.

After years of ignoring the ecological effects of its own vanishing forests, such as soil erosion, the Chinese government has finally begun to pay more attention to the cost of relentless growth. Massive floods in 1998 prompted Beijing to impose strict laws to prevent deforestation in watersheds, especially along the flood-prone Yangtze and Yellow rivers, where overlogging had caused excessive runoff that led to the flooding.

And this month, the government announced a 5% consumer tax on disposable chopsticks and hardwood flooring in an effort to discourage wood consumption.