Bangkok - Vietnam's booming wood furniture industry, which
earned the country 2.4 billion dollars last year, is smuggling an
estimated 500,000 cubic metres of illegal timber from neighbouring
Laos, environmental groups disclosed Wednesday.
Vietnam, whose wood furniture exports have increased ten-fold
since 2000, has shifted from using illegal timber from Cambodia, Laos
and Indonesia over the past seven years, according to investigations
conducting by the UK-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA)
with Indonesian non-governmental organization Telapak.
'Vietnam has an unenviable track record when it comes to dealing
in stolen timber,' said the latest EIA/Telapak report on the illegal
timber trade in South-east Asia called 'Borderlines - Vietnam's
Booming Industry and Timber Smuggling in Mekong Region.
Previous reports have uncovered illegal timber smuggling to
Vietnam, from neighbouring Cambodia in the late 1990s, and smuggled
shipments from Indonesia in 2003.
Since 2005, Vietnam's furniture industry has increasingly shifted
to supplies from neighbouring Laos, one of the world's poorest
countries.
'Based on our field observations, EIA/Telepak estimate that at
least 500,000 cubic metres of logs move from Laos to Vietnam every
year,' said Julian Newman, EIA's head of forests campaign.
The illicit trade in timber between Laos and Vietnam is worth an
estimated 250 million dollars a year, and translates into huge export
earnings for Vietnam, which now ranks among the world's major
wooden furniture exporters.
Thai and Singaporean companies are complicit in the trade, having
won dubious logging concessions from Laos, although the communist
state has had a ban on raw timber exports for more than a decade.
EIA/Telapak filmed at interview with Thai businessman Prakit
Sribussaracum, owner of the LVT International Company, in which he
admits to having paid bribes to Lao officials to secure the timbering
concession in eastern Laos.
'I pay government people, I pay every step,' Prakit said in a
recorded interview with investigators posing as buyers.
The two organizations called for more legislation in Europe and
the United States to ban imports of wood furniture that are sourced
with illegal wood.
'We would like to see Europe enact some legislation to prevent
illegal-sourced timber wood products from entering the market,' said
Faith Doherty, EIA's political coordinator.
But she admitted that it was difficult to determine the origin of
most wood products, given the 'laundering' process that
documentation goes through.
There has been progress made, however, in pressuring Vietnam to
improve the transparency of its furniture sourcing, she said.
'At the moment, the European Union has requested informal
negotations with Vietnam to try to tackle this problem,' Doherty
said. 'Vietnam has an opportunity to step up and show it is willing
to address its consumption and its porcessing of the illegal supply
its relies on.'
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