Timber industry looks farther afield after ravaging Vietnam
HANOI - Vietnam's forests were once deemed endangered. There is little left now to worry about.
The timber industry, having laid waste to the country's green cover as well as that in neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, has set its sights farther afield.
According to several estimates, 60 percent of Vietnam's forest cover was destroyed during the Vietnam War which ended in 1975. Half of the remainder has vanished since then, thanks to human activity.
Households foraging for firewood, poachers, slash-and-burn cultivators and rapid urbanisation as well as industry's insatiable hunger have been eating away at what was left.
Government figures show that more than 2,000 hectares (about 5,000 acres) of forests were destroyed last year alone in Vietnam. The authorities are waging a losing battle against powerful marauders.
"Despite a fall in the number of cases uncovered, timber trafficking by several smuggling rings intensified in 2005," says agriculture ministry official Do Tri Cuong.
"The smugglers don't shirk from attacking forest rangers, three of whom were killed and eight wounded last year," Cuong says. "Official figures only show the tip of the iceberg of timber trafficking."
Experts say all of Southeast Asia's forests are threatened.
"It's very hard to speak at a country specific level, it's more a regional trade issue," says Fergus MacDonald of the conservation group WWF in Hanoi.
Having finished with forests nearer home, Vietnamese traffickers crossed over to Laos and Cambodia, where age-old trees have gradually disappeared, mostly with the complicity of local officials.
"In Laos, there's no management plan, there's no harvesting map, there's no boundaries," says a foreign businessman, requesting anonymity.
Until three or four years ago, he says, "a Vietnamese logging company would have a permit from some government offices saying everything between that river and this one can be cut. And there was nobody there to check what the company was doing."
Today, half the timber trade in Vietnam is illegal, he says. The raw material is being sourced from elsewhere -- Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar or Papua New Guinea.
In these countries, the wood "is legalized when its exported. They make some funny paperwork and everything looks fine", the businessman adds.
The international campaigning organisation Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) estimates that timber trafficking in East and Southeast Asia is worth 2.5 billion dollars (two billion euros) a year.
EIA is seeking to promote international conventions of forestry protection, noting that many governments are serious about tackling the issue. In 2001, Southeast Asian countries agreed to fight timber trafficking, signing several agreements to that effect.
But little appears to have actually changed.
"Unfortunately, no shipments of illegal wood have actually been halted as a result," the organisation notes.
"No country in Asia or elsewhere has laws which specifically prohibit the import of timber or wood products which were illegally sourced in the country of origin," it says.
Promoting reforestation and legal commerce in timber would need sustained regional cooperation as well as private traders' participation, experts say.
Danish furniture maker ScanCom, for instance, insists on verifying the legality of the timber it buys in Latin America and South Africa but it has little use for official certificates of authenticity.
"We could not believe any papers" purporting to certify the legal origin of the wood, says Chad Ovel, managing director of ScanCom Vietnam.
"I go around the world, I buy the wood, import it to Vietnam, sell it to the factory. They process it and sell the furniture back to me. That's the only way."
That attitude is commended by WWF's MacDonald, who wants retail buyers to show similar concern.
During a recent conference attended by three American firms, the WWF broached the issue of tracing the legality of timber products. "Two of them answered: our consumers don't care, so why should we?," McDonald says.
"As long as this attitude prevails, there's very little hope."
It is precisely at the source that the legality of the timber should be verified whatever the cost, says the activist.
"Business is in a position to make the change faster than politics.
"If companies in Europe want to be able to tell their customers they can verify that any timber they buy comes from a legal and sustainable business, those companies have to pay for it."
Agence France Presse - February 18, 2006.
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