What is the problem?Each year in Britain we use millions of cubic metres of wood, both as wood and wood products, and paper or card. Around 10% of this wood is tropical hardwood. The 4 largest suppliers of tropical hardwoods to the UK are: Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia and Cameroon The other 90% of timber imports come from northern countries - Canada, Sweden, Finland, Russia and the USA.
Logging for timber (and the associated establishment of managed forests) is damaging the environment including continuing to destroy the world's natural, old-growth forests. People and biodiversity suffer from illegal logging. Yet amazingly, it is not against the UK law to import or sell illegally sourced timber here.
Orangutans are in grave danger of extinction because their rainforest habitat is being converted for human use - the biggest threat is permanent agriculture in the form of palm oil plantations and more recently illegal logging within protected areas Information in this section from Friends of the Earth: Further information from:
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Friends
of the Earth estimate that illegal timber may comprise approx 60% of the
UK's direct tropical timber imports. As a result the UK has been
responsible for illegally logging 130,000 hectares of tropical forest
per year.
Illegal
logging is when timber is harvested, processed, transported, bought or
sold in violation of national laws. Examples include illegally obtaining
concessions (eg. via corruption), cutting trees without permission or
outside the prescribed area and taking out more trees, under-sized trees
or over-sized trees than is permitted.
