As Chinese Demand Razes Burma's Forests, Even Loggers Voice Regret

[hatrack]

PANG SANG, MYANMAR -- "The story is told in a glance at the border crossing between China and Myanmar. On the Chinese side: rolling hills of green forests. On the Myanmar side: denuded hills where the forests have been crudely hacked down. And on the streets of this border town, dozens of big Chinese trucks are loaded with piles of pine logs and rough-hewn lumber from Myanmar. The trucks are headed north to China, where the booming economy has created a voracious appetite for the virgin forests of neighbouring countries.

The timber trade to China is so massive that it is provoking remorse even among those who are doing the selling. "It's the biggest mistake we've made," said Bao Youxiang, head of the United Wa State Army, a former guerrilla army that has become a regional authority in northeastern Myanmar. "We've destroyed our environment," he said. "Because of a lack of income, the local authorities were forced to sell this resource to China. It's the only resource they had."

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In an effort to protect its endangered forests, China imposed a nationwide ban on logging in 1998. But there is growing evidence that it has merely exported this problem to other Asian countries, where the burgeoning Chinese demand has fuelled a surge in excessive and illegal logging, leading to the destruction of huge swathes of pristine old-growth forests. China's timber imports from Indonesia, for example, are reported to be 200 times greater than the officially recorded amount. Its timber imports from Russia soared by 70 per cent from 2001 to 2002, and environmentalists believe at least 20 per cent of the imported lumber was illegally logged. China also imports heavily from countries such as Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea.

But it is Myanmar that may have suffered the heaviest damage to its old-growth forests. Those forests, which covered 60 per cent of the country as recently as 1960, now cover less than 30 per cent. And the percentage is falling fast. Until recently, Myanmar was one of the most thickly forested countries in the world. Its vast ancient forests were among the richest and most biodiverse in the world. It still contains more than 80 per cent of the world's teak trees, along with many other rare hardwoods. But when economic sanctions were imposed on Myanmar's military dictatorship in the 1990s, the regime responded with a dramatic increase in logging concessions and timber exports to bolster its revenue and maintain its power. Today it has one of the world's highest rates of deforestation."

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[madrchsod]

1. cheap walmart furniture

yup- walmart is going into the furniture business and i bet all those pieces aren`t made in north carolina but in some slave labor factory in china.

[el_gato]

2. just another example of the commodification of the planet

sowing the seeds of our own destruction

[phantom power]

3. some days

I feel like we're doing to the entire planet what we did to Easter Island.