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Timber trade's unkindest cut

Atug-of-war is tearing Southeast Asia's tropical forests apart. The struggle is between the region's booming economic giant, China, and environmentalists seeking to preserve delicate, life-sustaining ecosystems. With rising mountains of imported timber at mainland customs checkpoints, it is obvious which side is winning.

For environmentalists, the battle is one of life and death. As forests disappear at rates too quick to regrow, so do plants and animals, the fresh water supplies they help replenish and the livelihoods of the people who depend on them to survive.

Earlier this month, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, another effect was revealed when more than 200 people were killed as floodwaters ripped through the resort town of Bohorok. Officials blamed illegal logging in the surrounding national park and Forestry Minister Muhammad Prakosa ordered the reforestation of 300,000 hectares of land across the country.

Although China's thirst for timber for its thriving construction, furniture and paper industries was not directly implicated, the disaster highlighted a problem mainland authorities have long recognised. With much fanfare last December, they signed with the Indonesian government a memorandum of understanding to take steps to regulate timber imports by preventing illegal logging. Indonesia has made similar pacts with Britain, Japan and Malaysia, among others, over the past two years.

Neither was Indonesia's reaction to the Sumatra flood unusual. Asian governments have long recognised the importance of tropical forests and have imposed bans on the removal of trees and implemented programmes for plantations to produce timber for commercial use. In 1989, Thailand banned the logging of natural forests in direct response to floods and landslides that claimed 400 lives the previous year.

China imposed a similar nationwide ban in September 1998, after 6,500 people died in devastating floods on the Yangtze River which were linked to the removal of 85 per cent of the natural tree cover in the river's upper basin. The southern province of Yunnan pre-empted the decision by imposing a ban two years earlier after 600 people were killed in flash floods.

But the bans, coming amid the mainland's yearly economic growth rates over the past decade of at least eight per cent, have exposed a problem - that China does not produce enough timber in its own commercial forests to meet demands. The World Wildlife Fund estimates four million cubic metres of logs were imported in 1997 and customs statistics show the amount rose to 16.37 million cubic metres in 2001. Environmental groups estimate the figure is now more than 20 million cubic metres.

More than 60 per cent of China's timber imports come from softwood forests in Siberia. What concerns environmentalists, though, is often illegal logging of Southeast Asia's rapidly disappearing ancient tropical trees. The mainland's rising demands are to blame, they claim.

The trend of diminishing tropical forests is global. Half the world's forests have now disappeared and continue to be cut down at a rate of 15 million hectares a year. The figures are just as spectacular in Southeast Asia. The Washington-based environmental group Earth Policy Institute said in a report issued last year that in just 50 years, Indonesia's forest cover fell from 162 million hectares to 98 million hectares. Illegal logging was said to have destroyed 10 million hectares.

The Philippines, which once had 16 million hectares of forests, now has less than 700,000 hectares, the report said. Illegal logging was rampant and cited as a cause for flooding, water shortages, erosion, river siltation and mudslides. All of Southeast Asia's countries faced similar problems. The report blamed China for much of the problem. It said the mainland consumed nearly 280 million cubic metres of timber a year, but domestic supply provided only 142 million cubic metres.

'As production shrinks, China is turning to imports and illegal logging to make up for the shortfall,' the report said. 'The International Tropical Timber Organisation forecasts that within the next few years China will become the world's largest log importer, edging out the US and eclipsing Japan, whose massive imports have already destroyed many of the rainforests of the Philippines and much of Borneo.'

The US, the world's biggest importer of timber, was partly responsible for the mainland's timber demands because of bilateral trade, the general manager of the American Forest and Paper Association's China office, Matthew Brady, said yesterday.

'A lot of raw materials in the form of logs and lumber are going from the US to China for reprocessing and then going back,' Mr Brady said from his Beijing office. 'It's a domestic political issue in the US because American wood exporters are doing well but furniture manufacturers are not.'

The US, like China, gets its timber from throughout the world, but its forestry resources are markedly different. Unlike the US, China has a serious problem with domestic supply. Although Americans use about 70 times as much wood as Chinese - about 360 cubic metres of timber per 1,000 people - the US was the world's largest producer of forest products. 'While the US population has doubled in the past 60 years, the forest base has remained stable and the industry has been able to meet demands,' Mr Brady said. 'China has experience huge deforestation, which is why it has to bring in so much wood and other pulp paper products.'

Analysts believe that since the creation of modern China in 1949, little attention had been paid to the environment. Efforts were now being made and the government wants to increase the mainland's forest cover from the present 16.8 per cent to 22 per cent by 2010. Observers doubt this is possible given the allocated resources.

Environmentalists agreed last week, saying the results of such policies were not evident. Instead, they pointed to the increasing degradation of the region's forests to meet China's demands.

In a report issued last month, the British-based group Global Witness said neighbouring Myanmar's forests were being targeted, with hardwood trees being cut down at an alarming rate in northern Kachin state and being taken by road into Yunnan. Global Witness spokesman Jon Buckrell said China had a two-faced policy on logging. 'China has recognised that the way it has itself been affected by deforestation and logging is a bad thing,' he said. 'Why would they therefore sanction logging in a neighbouring country which is equally destructive?'

Mr Buckrell said logging in Kachin was unsustainable because entire hillsides of forests were being cut down. Large disparities also exist between the amount of timber China reported it was getting from Myanmar and the amounts recorded as exported. In 2001, China said 850,000 cubic metres of timber crossed the border - 160,000 cubic metres more than the amount Myanmar claimed to have exported to all countries that year.

Last year, China said it imported one million cubic metres of timber from Myanmar and the figure is expected to top 1.4 million this year. The published figures are just the tip of an ever-expanding iceberg, environmental groups say. Illegal logging, through corruption, accounts for much of the timber heading to China.

Activist Faith Doherty, of the Environmental Protection Investigation Agency in London, said smuggling was increasingly hard to detect, with logs coming from Indonesia entering China through Vietnam and Laos. 'Indonesia is a highly corrupt country and it doesn't matter how many trees are planted, as long as the corruption exists, addressing a sustaining and legal market will be impossible,' she said.

That Indonesia and China had signed an agreement acknowledging smuggling was a problem was an important first step, she said. The core issue now was enforcement - which would be difficult given the complexity of the trade.

Although the two countries had already made efforts to clamp down on the illegal trade, a regional push was the best solution. 'There needs to be a regional protocol on enforcement,' Ms Doherty said. 'Illegal timber might come out of one country and go into another and then to a third. What is needed is that all enforcement authorities, police and customs officials among them, work together to ensure the illegal trade is stamped out.'

With demand and supply driving China's seemingly unstoppable growth, such a possibility would seem idealistic. Yet at official levels, the will seems to exist to protect Southeast Asia's forests. The challenge is making that determination filter through to logging companies and smugglers. [email protected]

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