Activists Expose Huge Tropical Hardwood Smuggling Ring In Indonesia

[hatrack]

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Environmental activists said Thursday they had uncovered the world�fs biggest smuggling racket involving a single type of wood, with huge shipments of logs being shipped from Indonesia�fs remote Papua New Guinea to China.

The Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit based in Britain and the United States, and its Indonesian partner Telapak said the illegal billion-dollar trade was threatening what they called the last remaining intact tropical forests in the Asia-Pacific region. Following a three-year investigation, the groups said in a report that international criminal syndicates were behind �gmassive looting�h of merbau trees from Papua province.

They said merbau, a hardwood used mainly for flooring, was being taken from Papua at a rate of around 300,000 cubic meters of logs each month to feed China�fs timber processing industry.

�gWe think that this is the biggest case of a single species of timber, merbau, being smuggled from one location to another location,�h Julian Newman, an EIA member, told a news conference in Jakarta. �gOur research shows this trade in merbau between Papua and China is being controlled by a few people, a few syndicates, so it�fs the biggest sort of smuggling racket in terms of the volume and value of the timber being smuggled." Indonesia has the world�fs worst deforestation rate, with an area the size of Switzerland being lost every year, the groups said. More than 70 percent of Indonesia�fs original frontier forests have been lost."

EDIT

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6986949/

[glitch]

1. Thanks for the article - this is the kind of group I can really support

interesting I didn't see their web link on the article. Here are two:

http://www.eia-international.org/

http://www.ecocrimes.org/

Edited to add:
http://www.eia-international.org/cgi/news/news.cgi?a=234&t=template.htm
their press release on the timber racket

Thanks for posting another heartbreaking article, Hatrack. You are relentless and do good work.