doesn't, won't, be exploited or wrecked by its
associations with china, her is a little toothpick to chew on
ken
>GLOBAL: China, the timber baron
>
>JOHANNESBURG, 15 July 2010 (IRIN) - The
>Kimberley Process Certification Scheme is an
>initiative to prevent conflict diamonds from
>being traded; what if there was a similar
>initiative to put illegal logging out of
>business? Sam Lawson, the lead author of a new
>report produced by Chatham House, a UK-based
>think-tank, acknowledges it is an idea that should be pursued.
>
> The report is the first detailed assessment of
> how five developing countries - Brazil,
> Indonesia, Cameroon, Malaysia and Ghana - have
> succeeded in more than halving illegal logging.
>
> But the authors noted with some alarm that in
> 2008 more than half the illegally sourced wood
> being imported by the five big consumer
> countries - the United States, Japan, the
> United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands -
> arrived via third-party processing countries,
> mainly China. This is a huge rise from just 15 percent eight years earlier.
>
> The need to get the global community to act
> cohesively on reining in illegal logging has
> grown more urgent. "It is increasingly
> important that processing-country governments
> take additional and more significant action," the report warned.
>
> Countries like the US amended legislation in
> October 2008, making it illegal to handle
> illegally harvested timber, and on 7 July 2010
> the EU parliament approved similar legislation.
> At a recent meeting in Canada the G-8 group of
> industrialised countries called for stronger
> efforts to check illegal logging, saying it was "fuelling conflicts".
>
> "The global community should try to build on
> these efforts in developing programmes to
> reduce emissions from deforestation and
> degradation (REDD) in developing countries,"
> said Lawson, an Associate Fellow of Chatham House.
>
> The REDD strategy is part of the UN climate
> change negotiation process to help local
> communities conserve forests, which includes
> funding these efforts via government and
> market-based mechanisms like trading the carbon
> stored by forests as credits to greenhouse gas-emitting industries.
>
> "But my fear is that the REDD process might
> end up paying lip-service to the real issue,"
> Lawson said, with the money not reaching
> efforts to police and conserve the forests, or
> strengthening policy. The UN Development
> Programme pointed out in its 2007 annual report
> that most of the money for deforestation was channelled into planting trees.
>
> Lawson said the other option was that
> countries such as Cameroon, which had signed
> voluntary partnership agreements with the
> European Union to prevent illegal wood from
> reaching member states, should build on this to
> cover harvesting, processing and exports for other countries it dealt with.
>
> "While almost half of Cameroon's logging
> concession area has now been subjected to some
> form of voluntary independent legality or
> sustainability verification in order to meet
> the concerns of European buyers, the remainder
> is largely geared towards exports to less
> sensitive markets, such as China," the report pointed out.
>
> China is the world's top importer and exporter
> of illegal wood; it imports 20 million cubic
> metres of illegal timber every year - more than
> all five of the main consumer countries combined.
>
> The good news is that some of the checks and
> balances are paying off: in the last decade
> illegal logging dropped by 50 percent in
> Cameroon, between 50 and 75 percent in the
> Brazilian Amazon, and by 75 percent in
> Indonesia, preventing the degradation of up to
> 17 million hectares of forest - an area bigger
> than England and Wales combined.
>
> jk/he[END]
>
>
>
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>Subscribed Email: harrow@msu.edu
Kenneth W. Harrow
Distinguished Professor of English
Michigan State University
harrow@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 517 353 3755
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