Washington, D.C. -- It's been clear to environmentalists for years that illegal logging was one of the major threats to the world's forests. While it happens, pathetically often, here in the U.S., it has become a central problem in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
We now understand that illegal logging is a big part of the global warming problem. Deforestation is responsible for 30 percent of total CO2 emissions every year. While some of it is the result of legal logging, most is caused by either illegal forest clearing to convert rainforest into livestock pasture, or for the illegal logging trade. Eighty-three percent of the mahogany logged from Peru is illegally cut.
U.S. policy actively encourages this trade and foreign trade agreements facilitate illegal shipments. Since the U.S. signed a free trade agreement with Singapore, illegal Indonesian timber shipments through Singapore have increased by 62 percent. Free trade agreements proposed by the Bush administration had no enforceable mechanisms to discourage illegal logging, and when Greenpeace exposed the trade, the U.S. government tried to shut down Greenpeace, not the loggers.
And the damage is not just environmental. Proceeds from illegal logging propped up the regime of Liberian strong-man Charles Taylor until environmental activist and Goldman Prize-winner Silas Siakour risked his life, blew the whistle and got the UN to shut down the illegal logging trade. Legitimate governments also lose badly needed tax revenues to the illegal timber market. The leakage is an estimated $15 billion a year, 10 TIMES total U.S. foreign aid for economic development! Illegal logging is often carried out through modern day slavery -- 33,000 people are estimated to be subjected to forced labor producing illegal Peruvian mahogany.
Like most illegal businesses, the global market in stolen timber also hurts honest producers. Legitimate forest products producers in the U.S. lose about $1 billion a year due to depressed prices and loss of export markets. This reality has produced a ray of hope in an otherwise fairly gloomy situation. An unprecedented coalition that includes the Sierra Club, the Rainforest Action Network, the United Steelworkers, the Teamsters Union, the American Forests and Paper Association, and the Nature Conservancy has joined together to support legislation that would extend the protections of the Lacey Act, which prohibits the importation, exporting, transporting, sale and purchase of illegally captured and endangered species. The Lacey Act has been one of the most effective global environmental treaties, and extending its protections to flora could be the first step towards producing a global timber business that is honest, instead of an armed racket, which is what most of it is today.
This proposal builds on an earlier initiative by the Sierra Club and the Steelworkers to ask the International Trade Commission to investigate illegal Chinese logging; the Commission has agreed to do so.
The bill was introduced in the Senate by Senator Ron Wyden (OR), while on the House side a bi-partisan trio of Representatives Blumenauer (D-OR), Weller (R-IL) and Wexler (D-FL) have taken the lead.