Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 7 • Number 14 • 20th July 2007

China Calls on Companies to Practise Sustainable Forestry

Discuss this articleShare your views with other visitors, and read what they have to say

The Chinese government on 10 July unveiled a draft of a forestry handbook that calls on its logging companies to practise sustainable forestry at home and overseas.

The new manual “positively guides and standardises Chinese companies’ sustainable forestry activities overseas, promotes the sustainable development of forestry in those countries, [and] protects the international image of our government being responsible,” according to a statement from the Chinese Ministry of Forestry, as reported by Reuters.

The handbook has already gone out to industry groups and provincial governments throughout the country; it will soon be distributed to city- and county-level officials as well, the statement said.

The move comes amid a spate of negative publicity regarding China’s voracious demand for timber. Indeed, China has come under fire recently from environmental groups who claim that the country imports illegally harvested wood from fragile tropical forests in Africa, Latin America, and other parts of Asia in order both to satisfy its domestic demand for timber and to fuel its growing exports of finished wood products.

After concluding that deforestation was the primary cause of a series of massive floods along the Yangtze River that killed 2,500 people in 1998, Beijing implemented a set of strict logging bans inside its borders. But while those measures succeeded in reducing deforestation within China, they also had the effect of driving Chinese timber companies overseas for new sources of wood. As a result, analysts claim, countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Papua New Guinea have seen dramatic rises in both legal and illegal timber harvesting in recent years.

For its part, Beijing maintains that Western demand for its manufactured wood products is equally to blame for spurring illegal logging in tropical forests.

“China Urges Responsible Logging Overseas,” REUTERS, 11 July 2007; “China calls for sustainable logging by Chinese firms overseas,” 11 July 2007, MONGABAY.COM; “Crackdown drives illegal logging to neighboring nations,” 29 October 2006, INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE.