Greenpeace has accused China of importing vast amounts of wood for its furniture industry from endangered rainforests in Papua New Guinea, leading to the destruction of the world's last remaining ancient forests.
Greenpeace's report on PNG's forests was released today as delegates from 182 countries attended a UN-sponsored conference on biodiversity in The Hague.
It said PNG's Paradise Forests were among the largest and most biologically diverse ancient forests left in the world.
But their destruction had been driven by "China's huge demand for raw material for furniture material", it said.
Up to 1994, China imported around 60,000 cubic metres of logs and timber annually from PNG and by 2000 it was importing 740,000 cubic metres - a 12-fold increase, Greenpeace said.
It also laid the blame for this massive increase on the introduction of new laws by China in 1998 which banned logging in the remaining natural forests of the country's western provinces.
The legislation was introduced to protect the upper reaches of its main rivers after logging was identified as the principal cause of the huge floods in 1998.
Greenpeace said PNG's logging sector is dominated by just a few large operators "which jeopardises the livelihoods of thousands of forest-dependent communities and destroys habitat critical to countless species of plants and animals.
"It also costs the PNG government millions of dollars each year in lost revenue through widespread transfer pricing, misreporting of log volumes and species and other forms of tax evasion and theft."
Greenpeace highlighted one such example as that of the Kiunga-Aiambak Road project, located in the country's western province.
According to Greenpeace, the project "purported to be a development project to further the region's economy ... over the last seven years has yielded over 600,000 cubic metres of logs with a declared export value of more than €68 million."
The project "in practice is nothing more than a licence to log on a large and uncontrolled scale, with no regard for even basic environmental or forest management standards."
AFP
