Michael Richardson: Illegal logging and pulp fiction

The piles of imported logs in Zhangjiagang, China's biggest timber port, about an hour's drive north of Shanghai, are impressive. But many of them are illegally felled, say conservationists, who want to see Chinese authorities work with foreign Governments to curb a trade they say is causing immense damage to the Asian and Pacific environment.

Seven years ago, China was hit by disastrous floods in the Yangtze and other rivers. The Government responded by banning logging, which was blamed for stripping trees from forests and mountain watersheds, speeding the flow of rainwater into rivers. This rapid runoff had caused soil erosion, which intensified silt deposits and made the river channels shallower.

The Government also expanded its reforestation programmes and offered incentives to restore tree cover in erosion-prone areas.

China's forest management policies are increasingly responsible at home. But what about abroad?

Domestic wood production has been declining since 1995. However, demand for forest products - from wood for housing to pulp for paper and packaging - is rising fast, with China's turbo-charged economy.

In 2003, China produced an estimated 79 million cu m of wood for industrial use. It also imported 94 million cu m of forest products. It is the second-biggest forest products consumer, after the United States.

Even so, Chinese per capita consumption of timber is small compared with industrialised countries. The average US or Japanese citizen uses 17 or six times more wood, respectively, than the typical resident of mainland China.

This lag, and the potential for Chinese demand to explode, worries environmental activists. They are also worried by the impact this is already having on Asian timber-producing countries that are unwilling or unable to protect their forests.

A recent Worldwide Fund for Nature report said much of the timber imported by China came from countries that lacked sound forest management and controls. Russia, Indonesia and Malaysia supply more than half China's wood imports. Others include Papua New Guinea, Burma and Gabon in West Africa.

New Zealand, Germany, the US and Canada are also in this second, tier, but they follow more sustainable forestry practices. Indonesia and Russia are also among the leading suppliers of pulp and paper to China.

"China will soon be leading the global wood market," said Dr Zhu Chunquan, director of WWF's forest programme in China. "We hope that it will also lead the efforts to safeguard the world's forests."

An increasing proportion of China's wood needs - about 38 million cu m in 2003 - is being used to manufacture furniture and other products for export to the West. Environmental groups say that not only China is accepting illegally cut logs; Europe, the US and Japan have also done little to control the burgeoning and lucrative trade.

In an effort to curb rampant illegal logging that has seriously depleted both its tropical forests and Government revenues, Indonesia banned the export of logs and unprocessed timber in 2003. But the ban has been widely circumvented, which is not difficult in remote regions such as Kalimantan and Papua, where rules are difficult to enforce and corruption is rife.

Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ordered a crackdown on illegal logging in March. Among the 157 people arrested since then for log poaching in Papua were two police and one military officer, two senior forestry officials, nine Malaysians and a South Korean. Police seized a large quantity of logs, machinery, tugboats and barges.

Not long before the crackdown, the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency said it had uncovered a timber-smuggling operation stretching from Papua to China, describing it as the world's largest logging racket, involving the valuable merbau species - a hardwood mainly used for flooring.

The agency said 300,000cu m of merbau were smuggled out of Papua every month to feed China's timber processing industry - a trade worth US$1 billion ($1.4 billion) a year. It said the racket involved Indonesian military and civilian officials, Malaysian logging gangs and multinational companies, brokers in Singapore and dealers in Hong Kong.

"China is the largest buyer of stolen timber in the world," said Julian Newman of the EIA. "The smuggling of merbau logs between Indonesia and China violates the laws of both countries, so there is a clear basis for action."

Indonesian Forestry Minister Malam Sambat Kaban hoped to enlist Chinese Government support to fight illegal logging when Chinese President Hu Jintao signed eight bilateral agreements in Jakarta last month in a new "strategic partnership" with Southeast Asia's largest nation.

But Kaban could not get China to sign the ninth agreement he wanted. Beijing, he said, regarded all its commodity imports to be legal and did not care where they came from. He was, however, optimistic that an accord would eventually be reached.

Kaban said he and the Indonesian Trade Minister, Mari Pangestu, had urged China to encourage its wood- processing and manufacturing companies to open operations in Indonesia using legally harvested logs. "We have offered them the opportunity to invest in our downstream forestry industry so that they could receive a legal timber supply from sustainable resources," he said.

"We will give them incentives if they agree to it."

* The writer, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.