Asia’s forests are being destroyed at a staggering rate, and the finger of blame is now pointing at China. Over the past three decades, Japan’s hunger for timber helped destroy the rain forests of the Philippines and Borneo. Ecologists now fear China will chop down the rest, thanks in part to a cruel irony. In 1998, after the People’s Republic was hit by devastating floods caused by deforestation, Beijing banned logging along the upper reaches of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers–and called for a drastic reduction in other provinces. But in moving to avoid ecological disaster at home, Beijing is causing a catastrophe abroad: to make up for the shortfall in timber, China is devouring forests from Burma to Siberia to Indonesia, much of it in the form of illegal logging. “It is frustrating,” says one forest-conservation expert in Beijing. “The logging ban is good for China’s environment, but it is leading to the destruction of forests elsewhere.”
China has become, virtually overnight, the second largest importer of logs in the world, trailing only the United States. (The volume of uncut logs arriving in China has more than tripled since 1998 to over 15 million cubic meters.) The logging ban is a huge factor–China now produces only half the timber it consumes–but there are others, too. Domestic consumption is growing fast, as China’s burgeoning middle class buys new homes and Beijing undertakes huge civil-construction projects. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization has also driven tariffs for most timber imports down to zero, fueling imports as well as a rapidly expanding export industry in everything from pulp and paper to furniture and decorations, most of it destined for the United States and Europe. “China is not the only one to blame for the destruction of the rain forests,” says Zhu Chunquang, Beijing director of the forestry program for WWF, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund. “Everybody has a role, from the suppliers to the consumers.”
Not satisfied with legal imports, China’s hunger for wood has also caused a boom in illegal logging. According to international forestry experts, about 40 percent of China’s timber imports come from illegal clear-cutting, which endangers some of the earth’s most vital forests. Nearly half of China’s imports now derive from the vast coniferous forests in Russia’s Far East, a wild frontier where poverty, corruption and poor law enforcement allow some companies–often controlled by Chinese gangs–to cut trees illegally. Timber imports from Russia have risen from less than 1 million cubic meters in 1997 to nearly 9 million cubic meters in 2001, and one fifth of this trade is believed to be illegal. The result of this boom can be felt in the northern Chinese city of Suifenhe, where 200 freight cars filled with logs arrive every day.
Ecologists are even more concerned about the destruction of the tropical rain forests of Southeast Asia, whose rich biodiversity make them the “lungs of the earth.” The lowland forests of Indonesia, for example, are being systematically destroyed by a corrupt triangle of military officers, timber barons and international companies. Nearly three quarters of all timber in Indonesia comes from illegal logging, experts say. (The World Bank closed its last forestry-conservation project in Indonesia last October due to rampant timber trafficking in a so-called protected park in Sumatra.) At the current rate of destruction, the forests will disappear on Sumatra by 2005 and in Kalimantan by 2010. American firms may have contributed to the devastation: in 2000, the United States imported more than $450 million worth of timber from Indonesia.
Now China is coming in aggressively, renting out whole swaths of forest and muscling out competitors. “China is just sucking in the supply,” says one Filipino timber trader driven out of business last year. “We can’t compete because they pay more. The demand for wood in China is incredible.” So incredible, in fact, that they are quickly becoming the leading destination for Indonesia’s illegal logs. (The International Tropical Timber Organization in its 2002 report ranked China just behind Malaysia, but experts say that many logs heading to Malaysia are later rerouted to China.) Because the illegal logs are so cheap–no taxes in Indonesia, no tariffs in China–mainland companies have a huge competitive advantage in export markets for everything from chopsticks to furniture. Even logs. For a Jakarta-based company, in fact, the price of Chinese logs that originated in Indonesia and illegally passed through Chinese ports can be cheaper than the price of legal logs sold in Indonesia.
The Indonesian government has done little to stop the destruction. Last year there was a glimmer of hope when the Indonesian Navy seized three cargo ships loaded with 25,000 cubic meters of allegedly illegal logs destined for China. (Indonesia has banned the export of logs.) The ships and logs were impounded, and their crews detained, for seven months. The U.K.-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) claims that documents it obtained connect the shipment to a powerful Indonesian timber baron and to a large state-owned Chinese shipping company. But after Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri visited Beijing last fall, the case was dropped, the crews were released and the logs were auctioned off by the police to the highest bidder. “It’s not just an issue of trees but of governance,” says Faith Doherty, an EIA investigator who worked on the case.
The public-relations disaster, however, had a silver lining. At the end of December, Beijing and Jakarta signed a memorandum of understanding to curb the flow of illegal timber into China. It outlines no specific plans or policies, only a list of intentions. But activists see it as the first positive step in holding both governments accountable. “If there is a real commitment on the part of China to help put order in the process, we will get some improvements,” says David Kaimowitz, director-general of the Center for International Forestry Research, based in Bogor, Indonesia. His optimism derives in part from the fact that such agreements are so rare. Earlier this month in Cambodia, where 70 percent of logging is unregulated (and much goes to China), Phnom Penh expelled the environmental group Global Witness, which it had contracted to monitor illegal logging. The reason: the group had named corrupt officials involved in the timber trade.
Meanwhile, on the bustling Chinese border in Ruili, Meng is chain-smoking 555s and complaining about Burma’s crackdown on the sale of logs to China. A former soldier who sports a military buzz cut, Meng started his business in 1990 with a 50-kilometer trek into the Burmese mountains, from which he emerged with 100 horses carrying logs of teak, rosewood and other rare tropical hardwoods. Due to the massive, unregulated trade that has stripped bare hundreds of miles of ancient forest, Meng is now one of the richest men in Ruili. He has dozens of employees and several warehouses filled with logs, some a meter and a half in diameter and more than a century old. This is not high-end timber; that, he says, is now being shipped directly from Rangoon to Shanghai. And due to heightened scrutiny, even lower-quality logs are now traded in the dead of night–one reason Meng is easing out of timber and moving into Chinese medicines.
Still, Meng has no trouble getting a fresh supply. Using one of two cell phones, he simply calls a contact whom he identifies as a member of a “rebel government” in Burma’s Kachin state. “I call, and 24 hours later, the trucks come to deliver,” he says. Simple as that: one more chunk of the world’s ancient rain forests rumbles into China, ready to be cut, sawed and shaped in the service of the world’s fastest-growing economy.
