28 March
2006 - International — Imagine a football pitch
as you've seen it many times. It's a bit less than
one hectare in area. Now imagine that same football
pitch packed end-to-end with a pile of wood around
twice the height of Mt. Everest. That's the amount
of forest that is imported into China every year,
and the pile is getting higher.
The developed industrial economies
of North America, Europe, Japan and South Korea
are timber gluttons and consume more timber than
the planet can sustainably provide. That's the bad
news. The worse news is that the timber over consumption
habit is beginning to rub off on the emerging mega-economy
of China.
A report recently released by
Greenpeace called 'Sharing the Blame' shows that
in the past 10 years, timber imports into China
have increased by an enormous 4.5 fold to the double
Mt. Everest sized pile mentioned above. This huge
volume of extra timber isn't all being consumed
in China however, with exports of timber products
from China increasing by 3.5 fold in the same time
period.
Whilst demand for timber products
has risen sharply in China, the demand in the world's
big industrial economies has remained at an all
time high. China has become the clearinghouse for
the world's timber with every second tropical tree
traded in the world being sent to China. Unfortunately,
much of the merchandise is stolen goods.
The forest is felled in Indonesia
and Papua New Guinea, where between 76 to 90 percent
of the logging is illegal, and shipped to China
to be processed into plywood, furniture or paper
and exported to the forest hungry economies of North
America, Europe, Japan and South Korea.
'Sharing the Blame' isn't only
about the frightening statistics of the global timber
trade; it follows the illegally logged timber from
the forest to the finished product in the shops
and names the companies behind the illicit trade.
After being contacted by Greenpeace
and presented with the evidence, some international
timber buyers have already started to address the
issue of purchasing timber products made from illegal
logging. Numerous companies in Europe have made
commitments to stop purchasing Chinese plywood made
from illegally logged timber from Papua New Guinea.
The Chinese government has also
started to publicly acknowledge that consumption
issues must be tackled in China. In recognition
of this problem, in late March of this year, the
government imposed a 5 percent consumption tax on
disposable chopsticks and hardwood flooring to try
to stem the tide of forest destruction.
Whilst this is a good start, the fact that so many
companies internationally have been purchasing illegal
timber products without knowing or caring shows
that governments of the world have to get tough
with the illegal logging trade and ban imports of
illegal timber products.
The responsibility for ending
the over-exploitation of the world's last forests
is shared equally between the producer and the consumer
countries. The developed industrial economies of
North America, Europe, Japan and South Korea need
to dramatically reduce their consumption of timber
products and China needs to find a way to develop
its economy without simply following the poor example
of the timber gluttons.
After all the numbers are added
up and put into neat rows and columns of figures,
it is easy to forget that what isn't shown in the
statistics are lives; people's lives and the lives
of the plants and animals of the forests. And if
you put everything back together, all the pieces
combine to equal a couple of Mt. Everests of ancient
forest disappearing before our eyes.
