Illegal Timber Imports

Illegal exports of timber from developing countries

Research carried out for WWF suggests that the international timber trade is now the primary cause of forest degradation and loss in those forests that contain the highest levels of biodiversity. This contradicts the popular assumption that deforestation and forest degradation are caused mainly by shifting cultivators and fuelwood collection.

Following centuries of degradation, many natural forest ecosystems are now severely

threatened. Natural forests in many temperate and boreal countries have already been reduced to a few fragments and losses continue in the tropics. According to the latest global survey by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) deforestation is currently taking place in at least 76 countries, and in the majority of these the rate of loss is accelerating.

(UN Food and Agricultural Organisation, 1993)

Over the past two decades, the primary causes of deforestation have usually been identified as impacts from peasant farmers, including intensification of shifting agriculture, overgrazing by domestic livestock and fuelwood collection. Population growth has often been named as an underlying cause. Whilst these certainly all do play an important role in forest loss in some places, recent research by WWF (Nigel Dudley, Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, Francis Sullivan, 1995) suggests that, at least in those forests which are most important from the perspective of biodiversity, most contemporary assessments exaggerate the significance of clearance by peasant farmers and fuelwood collection, and understate the importance of industrial impacts, including particularly commercial timber extraction.

Assessments of the environmental impacts of the timber industry tend to draw on official studies of the legal timber trade. In some countries undergoing severe deforestation, the timber recorded by the Ministry of Forests is only a small proportion of the actual fellings and/or exports. Much illegal timber enters the international trade, with or without the knowledge of importers. Often, illegality is tacitly accepted by the buyer. Countries where illegal logging is having an important, and largely unquantified, impact on natural forests include (not an exhaustive list): Kenya (Marshall, N. T. and Jenkins, M, 1994)

, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam,