Love from China: illegally forested wood products

As you wander through Wal-Mart and J.C. Penny and run your hand by 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 worldly 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 plus 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.

that is particularly troubling considering the region is home to one of the Northern Hemisphere’s most critical ecosystems. But Russian officials say they are powerless to staunch the flow of wood from the country. Mafias benefit from the sale of that 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 commentary on the practice. For more detail, take a look at Stolen Forests.

[via The New Yorker]

[Source] Sea Stachura

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