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MALAYSIA: U.S. Groups Demand Sanctions for Illegal Timber Trade

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 5 2004 (IPS) - A coalition of leading U.S. environmental groups called Thursday for the administration of President George W. Bush to impose trade sanctions against Malaysia unless it takes immediate steps to crack down on the illegal timber trade.

In a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, the groups, which include the Sierra Club, the Defenders of Wildlife, Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace, among others, also called for an immediate ban on the import of ramin, a rare type of Indonesian hardwood, from Malaysia.

They wrote that the illegal trade in ramin is threatening some of Indonesia’s last remaining national parks and scores of the world’s endangered species, including orang-utans and the Sumatran tiger.

In response to growing concerns about illegal logging and trade in ramin, the Indonesian government banned all cutting and export of the tree in April 2001. But timber is still being cut down by local and Malaysian logging interests and then smuggled to Malaysia, according to the groups.

”Our concern,” they wrote, ”is deepened by new evidence indicating that officials in the Malaysian government are permitting and perhaps actively facilitating this illegal trade. Repeated efforts to address these serious problems have met with little success”.

The letter, which comes on the eve of next week’s meeting of the 188-nation Biodiversity Convention in Kuala Lumpur, was accompanied by a new report, also released Thursday, by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Telapak, an Indonesian group that has collaborated closely with western green groups.

EIA, which specialises in undercover investigations of the illegal trade in rare and endangered species, said it found ”wholesale laundering of ramin through Malaysia on an unprecedented scale” by that country’s traders, who circumvent existing bans on the export of Indonesian wood by reporting it as grown in Malaysia.

But the amount of ramin exported from Malaysia annually is estimated at more than twice what the country can itself produce in one year, according to EIA and Telapak.

The report, which was accompanied by a secretly recorded videotape of Malaysian businessmen bragging how they obtain government-issued documents to export ramin to China, Taiwan and other destinations where it is often made into products – such as baby cribs, mop handles, pool cues and picture frames – for domestic consumption or export to wealthy western nations.

A single port in Malaysia handles up to 70,000 metric tonnes of ramin timber each year, according to the EIA-Telapak report, ‘Profiting from Plunder: How Malaysia Smuggles Endangered Wood’.

The head of the Malaysian Timber Council (MTC), Ismail Awang, said the report’s charges were ”exaggerated and ridiculous”. In an interview posted at the MTC website, he said the problem was mainly one of Indonesia’s own enforcement of its export ban.

”Whatever timber exports Indonesia has deemed illegal and banned, Malaysia has reciprocated by banning those imports”, Awang said.

”If Indonesia believes it cannot control its illegal logging because of the vastness of the country and the numerous forest areas and exit points, Indonesia must determine who is eligible, stipulate the governing rules, and identify which ports Malaysia should deal with.”

The report also argued that Indonesian enforcement of its ramin export ban falls far short of what is required. ”This shocking evidence highlight Indonesia’s continuing failure to bring to justice timber barons who supply and transport this illegal timber”, it said.

But it stressed that Malaysia was also to blame for ”callous complicity” in the smuggling.

When Jakarta instituted the ban, it also listed the species on Appendix III of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), an international group that monitors and, if necessary, limits the trade in threatened species.

The Appendix III listing requires consuming countries to ban the import of ramin and ramin products that do not have CITES permits from the exporting countries. But shortly after ramin’s listing, Kuala Lumpur entered an official reservation to it, essentially opting out of its own commitments to enforce the ban.

When no consuming country accepted ramin from Malaysia without a CITES permit anyway, Kuala Lumpur began providing them. But the report charges that Malaysian officials issue false documentation and certificates of origin in order to ”launder” the Indonesian ramin.

U.S. customs authorities last year seized more than 120,000 goods made from ramin exported from China without a CITES permit.

Malaysia is by far the world’s largest exporter of tropical timber. In 2000 its exports of tropical logs, sawn timber, plywood and veneer were worth more than 2.4 billion dollars – greater than the value of the similar exports from Africa and South America combined.

But, as Malaysia’s own forests have been cut down, its timber industry has become increasingly reliant on illegal imports from Indonesia, which holds about 10 percent of the world’s remaining tropical forests, according to the EIA-Telapak report.

While Malaysia’s total domestic log production, for example, was cut almost in half over the past decade, its wood-processing industry has maintained the same capacity.

The country’s reliance on ramin has been particularly devastating to the Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan, one of the world’s last orang-utan refuges, according to EIA and Telapak.

”Every shipment of illegal Indonesian ramin sold by Malaysia is moving the orang-utans and other endangered species a step closer to extinction”, said EIA Director Allan Thornton in a statement.

”Malaysia is undermining the international community’s efforts, through CITES, to protect ramin and orang-utans.”

At a presentation here, the environmental groups said Malaysia should be given 90 days to withdraw its reservation to the CITES listing and take strong measures to halt all imports, transhipments and re-exports of Indonesian ramin, including investigating and prosecuting individuals, companies and officials who have been complicit in the trade.

If it fails to do so, says the group’s letter to Powell, they will petition the U.S. Secretary of Interior under a 1971 law designed to strengthen CITES to make a formal finding that Kuala Lumpur is undermining the ramin listing, and to adopt trade sanctions accordingly.