Commonwealth Forests

bullet1 Chapter 2: Sustainable forest management
bullet2 THREATS TO SUSTAINABLE FOREST MANAGEMENT

bullet3 Illegal logging3

Illegal activities associated with the timber trade cover a very wide range, from illegal logging (for example, in breach of the contract or outside the concession area), smuggling (often across national borders and sometimes of species restricted under CITES), misclassification and corruption - either on a large scale or petty.  One estimate has suggested that illegal activities may account for over one tenth of value of the global timber trade, worth over $150 billion yearly (Brack, 2003) while a review of the timber harvesting industry between 2000 and 2005 in Papua New Guinea found that most were not only ecologically and economically unsustainable but also illegal (Forest Trends, 2006). Illegal activities not only prevent the sustainable management of a country’s forest and deprive it of revenue, but also undermine its good governance by condoning disregard for the law and the tolerance of corruption. The constraints to dealing with illegal logging include:

  1. Lack of national capacity for the enforcement of forest (and other) laws, and co-ordination

  2. The ease with which timber may be moved across national borders

  3. The difficulty of distinguishing between legal and illegal timber

  4. The frequent absence of a legal framework in importing countries to use against timber produced illegally elsewhere.

Certification is part of, but not the complete answer to, combating illegal logging.  Section (f) above has shown that probably more than 17% of the forests of the Commonwealth are already covered by certification schemes.  Certification is, however, costly for small or community-owned woodlands; even the scheme of the Forest Stewardship Council for Small and Low Intensity Managed Forest Scheme is expensive (Butterfield et al. 2005).

Some high-tech solutions have been proposed to curb illegal logging - for example, Cameroon has entered into partnership with the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch to map logging roads from satellite imagery (CFA Newsletter #28, March 2005), while the Indian State of Kerala proposed embedding microchips in sandalwood trees to track them by remote sensing (CFA Newsletter #27 of December 2004). But illegal logging will not be reduced without good governance and competent and motivated staff to enforce the forest laws.

3  The Special Issue of the International Forestry Review 5 (3) of September 2003 is an authoritative review of illegal logging and the illegal trade in forest and timber products.  More recently, a joint meeting of the Commonwealth Forestry Association and the Royal Commonwealth Society devoted to Trees, cash and politics: why good wood means good business reviewed the both the international situation and the particular case of the UK.  The two presentations on that occasion, by Brack and Roby, are available on the CFA website See also http://www.illegal-logging.info