Eurasia Review on 13th July carried an article saying that illegal wood trafficking allows other crimes to flourish, including deforestation, labour exploitation, land invasions, tax evasion, document forgery and state corruption. Illegal wood trafficking is the most profitable crime against natural resources and the world’s third most important crime, according to a report: “Transnational crime and the developing world,” published in March 2017 by Global Financial Integrity. The report estimates that, globally, this transnational crime generates $52 billion to $157 billion a year. The UN Environment Program (UNEP) estimates that 30% of the wood sold in the world has been illegally obtained. Latin American forests are the second most vulnerable in the world to illegal timber logging, after Asian forests, says UNEP. A report from EIA, a US-based NGO: “Moment of Truth: Promise or Peril for the Amazon as Peru Confronts its Illegal Timber Trade,” published in January 2018, sheds light on “timber laundering”, a practice known as “timber washing,” meaning the sale of illegally obtained timber with fake permits; by providing the authorities with lists of trees to be logged that don’t actually exist.
The EIA report is at –
https://eia-global.org/reports/momentoftruth
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