Jim Lobe, Washington – Two major environmental groups are charging that BlueLinx, the largest US building-products distributor, is knowingly importing legally disputed, undocumented timber out of Indonesia's endangered rainforests.

Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network (RAN) said they had examined records of the US Customs and Border Protection, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, that proved that BlueLinx is flooding the US market with artificially cheap luaan plywood after buying and shipping it from eight Indonesian mills.

Several other US companies, including Centex Corp, International Paper, and Lanoga Corp, have been observing a voluntary ban on buying Indonesian wood products, and the environmental two groups are demanding that BlueLinx do the same.

The companies that own the mills all have well-documented histories with Indonesia's Department of Forestry of trafficking in illegal timber, according to RAN and Greenpeace, which also stressed that Indonesia suffers the world's worst deforestation rate, estimated at more than 2.8 million hectares a year, an area roughly equivalent to Switzerland.

"Indonesia suffers from widespread illegal logging," said Allan Thornton, president of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), which released its own investigation of the smuggling of valuable merbau logs from Indonesia's Papua province to Chinese timber processors late last month.

"Throughout the country, plundering profit-seekers destroy forests, breed corruption and disrupt local communities," he said. "This devastation is being driven by unchecked demand for cheap tropical timber in the United States, China, and other consuming countries."

In its report, "The Last Frontier", the EIA charged that some 300,000 cubic meters of logs are being shipped out of one of the last remaining intact tropical forests in the Asian-Pacific region each month to feed demand for hardwood flooring and garden furniture in China, one of the world's fastest-growing economies.

"The Last Frontier" is a reference to the fact that most hardwood forests in East Kalmintan province and Sumatra island have been logged out over the last decade as the rate of deforestation has accelerated. Papua, Indonesia's poorest province, which also is troubled by a stubborn, low-level secessionist movement, is the last region where tropical hardwoods remain relatively plentiful.

EIA and its Indonesian partner organization, Telepak, found that local communities where the merbau is harvested receive only about US$10 for each cubic meter of merbau felled on their land, while the same logs are sold for as much as $270 per cubic meter once they reach China, where they are milled.

"Papua has become the main illegal logging hotspot in Indonesia," said Telepak's M Yayat Afianto. "The communities of Papua are paid a pittance for trees taken from their land, while timber dealers in Jakarta, Singapore and Hong Kong are banking huge profits."

According to the Department of Homeland Security's records, BlueLinx shipped more than 2,000 tonnes of plywood from the luaan tree between early May and the end of August last year. Greenpeace and RAN said BlueLinx officials admitted to the imports and insisted they would not stop buying or importing the wood.

The groups also noted that JPMorgan Chase Bank, whose backing for logging enterprises in tropical forests has long been a target of a RAN corporate campaign to persuade banks to fund only sustainable forestry projects, was leading a $165 million loan syndication for BlueLinx.

BlueLinx recently offered $120 million in common stock due to "a substantial amount of debt", according to filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission from last September.

"JPMorgan Chase has built its financial empire by making investments of mass destruction like BlueLinx," said Ilyse Hogue, who heads RAN's Global Finance Campaign.

"Illegal logging in Indonesia is both an environmental and humanitarian crisis. It is morally reprehensible that America's second-largest bank is connected with corrupt timber cartels that are directly responsible for the wholesale destruction of one of the most fragile and endangered forest ecosystems on Earth."

Indonesian officials, who say they lack the resources to stop illegal logging operations, particularly those that are protected by powerful, corrupt officials and the armed forces, argue that importing nations must do more to crack down on the trade.

"Expecting or asking one country to combat illegal logging while at the same time receiving or importing illegal logs does not support efforts to combat these forest crimes," Malam Sambat Kaban, Indonesia's forestry minister, said in a speech in January. "Allowing or importing illegal timber will only encourage illegal logging in the timber-producing country."

Most experts say that as much as 70% of Indonesia's wood supply derives from illegal logging, while the American Forest & Paper Association reported in 2004 that about 55% of plywood exports from Indonesia are illegal.

"Buyers and consumers must recognize and assume responsibility for how their actions contribute to this illegal logging crisis in Indonesia," said Lisa Curran, director of the Tropical Resources Institute at the Yale School of Forestry.

"We must lead by example, by implementing independently verified chain-of-custody programs that document the sources of wood products and materials. Consumers have a right to stump-to-store tracking of wood products to be sure they are purchasing products that were not acquired illegally from protected areas and national parks."

Norway, Finland and the European Union have all signed agreements with Indonesia not to import products made from illegal timber. The United States, however, currently has no laws on the books banning the import of illegally cut timber.

(Inter Press Service)