Environmental activists have exposed what they claim to be the world’s biggest timber-smuggling racket, the supply of the luxurious dark hardwood merbau from Indonesia’s eastern Papua province to China and then on to Europe and North America.
The London and Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency and its Indonesian partner Telapak, said on Thursday that if all the merbau, which is used mainly for flooring, is sold in the West, the trade would easily exceed £550-million a year.
One Indonesian trader said on camera that at least 5% of his illegal stock ends up in Britain, but it was not clear whether this is an industry average.
”In terms of volume and of a smuggling racket involving one species from one distinct place to another and just a few organised groups behind it, merbau from Papua is the world’s biggest,” said Julian Newman, the head of EIA’s forest campaigns.
Over the past three years an average of 300 000 cubic metres of merbau have been smuggled out of Papua each month, according to the 32-page report, titled The Last Frontier, Illegal Logging in Papua and China’s Massive Timber Theft.
Loggers are paid £5,75 a cubic metre, which is then sold for about £128 in China after being relabelled, usually with forged Malaysian documentation as Indonesia has imposed a log export ban. Market prices in the West are up to £1 450 a cubic metre.
The report’s comes a day after the American non-governmental Earth Policy Institute published research showing that China had surpassed the United States in the consumption of every major commodity except oil.
Indonesia and China have laws to combat illegal logging, but neither has succeeded in implementing them, mainly due to corruption within government agencies.
The illegal merbau trade would not be possible without the participation of members of Indonesia’s military and police at every stage, the EIA-Telapak report says, from the cutting down of the trees to protecting the ships until they leave Indonesian waters.
”The army, police and navy are all involved but it is mainly the navy,” said Yayat Afianto of Telapak. ”It is not the institutions but dozens of bad apples, including generals.”
He said that if the logging continued at its current rate, Papua, which has the largest remaining forest cover in the region, would be virtually bare in 10 years. ”The situation is getting worse and worse each year because there is nowhere left in Indonesia with such a large supply of timber.”
Environmentalists estimate an area of forest about twice the size of Wales is illegally felled in Indonesia every year.
No one from the Indonesian military was available for comment, but a spokesperson for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said that combating illegal logging was one of the government’s top priorities.
”The forestry minister has recently submitted dozens of names of important people suspected of being involved in illegal logging to the police and attorney general,” he said.
Environmentalists accept it will take years to eradicate corruption in Indonesia and China, so are also lobbying consumer countries to ban the sale of wood products that have not come from verifiably legally sourced trees. – Guardian Unlimited Â