This chart from the report illustrates the improbable spurt of new timber coming out of Indonesian, likely harvested rain forest trees funneled through legal plantations.
Tropical rain forests—enormous carbon sinks, workers of regional weather, home to millions of species, sources of new drugs—have a lot more to offer alive than dead; lumber isn’t much good at curing cancer or keeping global temperatures down. Yet deforestation continues, and even getting legislation that makes the logging of rain forest illegal is probably unlikely to deter the worst offenders. Though some estimates claim rates of deforestation have dropped, according to a new United Nations Environmental Program and INTERPOL report [pdf], that decrease is simply the result of better cover-up on the part of the criminal cartels that control the $ 30-100 billion a year business of illegal logging. Business in so-called “black” wood, it turns out, is flourishing.
The report describes in detail how illegal logging operations work and provides analyses of the social and government factors that facilitate them. One of the easiest ways to get illegal wood out of a country is by slipping it in with wood from an above-board plantation, for instance. This means …
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