China the center of illegal timber trade, Greenpeace says

China lies at the heart of a global trade plundering endangered rainforests in Southeast Asia to supply Europe and the US, the environmental group Greenpeace said in a report issued in Beijing on Monday.

The report described how timber from unlicensed logging in Malaysia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea was shipped to China and turned into furniture plywood and veneer, often sold to developed countries.

"A significant part of China's timber imports comes from illegal or destructive logging," Sze Pang Cheung (曾彭春), a Beijing-based campaign manager for Greenpeace, told reporters at the launch of the report. "Developed countries' demand for Chinese products is fueling the global forest crisis."

Calling it an unprecedented crisis, Sze said illegal logging was rampant in countries such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea that provide China with wood.

Between 76 percent and 90 percent of the logging in those two countries is illegal, the group said in a report.

Sze said Greenpeace had no firm estimate of the proportion of China's plywood exports that came from illegal logging. But he said the percentage was "high," noting vast discrepancies in countries' customs statistics and China's growing dependence on wood from Southeast Asia's lush but rapidly shrinking forests.

Half the tropical logs traded worldwide were destined for China, he said. In 2004, Chinese customs recorded imports of 2.8 million cubic meters of timber from Malaysia and Indonesia, but those two countries recorded shipping only 1.66 million cubic meters of timber to China.

Cheung said developed nations, which have switched to buying processed products from China instead of buying timber directly from other countries, were equally to blame for the problem since the rate of wood consumption in rich countries was even higher than in China.

"China, Europe, the USA, Japan and other consuming and timber supplying countries must equally share the blame for ancient forest destruction," the report said.