Kuala Lumpur – Malaysian ports are turning a blind eye to the passage of illegally logged timber, fuelling a trade that is wrecking Indonesian forests, environmental campaign groups said on Thursday.

A report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and its Indonesian partner organisation Telapak gave evidence of Malaysian businessmen boasting of having government licences to export smuggled ramin, a threatened tree species.

"The Malaysian government and timber industry are in a state of denial with their smuggling of illegal timber," EIA President Allan Thornton said in a statement to accompany the report.

Malaysian ports were handling tens of thousands of cubic metres (yards) of ramin each year, most of it shipped to China and Taiwan to be made into products such as pool cues, mop handles and picture frames for export, it said.

The trade hit the habitats of rare orangutans, sumatran rhinos and sun bears, the EIA said on the margins of a United Nations meeting intended to help conserve species.

Indonesia has protected areas dotted over territories across the Malay archipelago, but struggles to protect them in the face of lax enforcement, a lack of funds and pressure from poor communities trying to make a living.

At a separate event in Kuala Lumpur, the Indonesian government was due to commit to creating 12 new protected forest areas totalling 1.0 million hectares (2.5 million acres) and including Sumatra's Tesso Nilo and Borneo island's Sebangau. Officials from 188 countries and other parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity began two weeks of talks on Monday intended to slow significantly the rate of global extinctions of animals and plants by 2010.

The event will see developing countries, home to the bulk of the world's species, negotiate with developed ones over how they can benefit from protecting their assets and providing access to them.