Love from China: illegally forested wood products
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As you wander through Wal-Mart and J.C. Penny and run your hand over a lovely varnished Mission style oak kitchen table set for only $200.00 do you ever wonder how they manage to price such a pretty item so cheaply? Is it shoddy construction? Is it international workers paid a pittance?
Or is it wood chopped down illegally in Russia and shipped to China for use on a variety of wood products? Bingo.
China is the largest importer of logs and exporter of finished wood products, and it gets all that wood from Russia. Primorski Krai is a Russian province with an abundance of hardwoods like oak, ash and linden. The region once also had a plentiful population of pine until most of it was cut down.
About half of all the logs sent to China from Primorski Krai is illegally logged. That's of roughly five billion pounds of wood shipped from the region each year.
This is especially troubling because the region is home to one of the Northern Hemisphere's most important ecosystems. But Russian officials say they are powerless to staunch the flow of wood from the country. Mafias benefit from the sale of this wood, so do corrupt government officials.
Activist groups sometimes infiltrate these operations in which Russian and Chinese or the Peruvians and Americans or the Congolese and the Chinese or the Brazilians, the Ukranians, the Burmese and more organizations benefit from illegally and unsustainably harvesting trees. Often, members of these groups are murdered.
The New Yorker has an extensive article on the practice. For more detail, take a look at Stolen Forests.
[via The New Yorker]
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