Timber transported along the Amazon River is destined for the international market, photo © ParksWatch 2004.
La The vacuum gets bigger. China’s economic growth has created an insatiable demand for petroleum, minerals, and—you guessed it—timber products. Ten years ago, China was the seventh largest importer of forest products. Today, it is the second. This has created many more opportunities for exporters, but it has also increased illegal logging and forest destruction.
This process is closely examined in \”Satisfying China’s Demand for Forestry Products” by Xiufang Sun, Eugenia Katsigris, and Andy White with Forest Trends, China’s Center for Agricultural Policies, and CIFOR. As the Chinese get richer, they make more houses and buy more books and newspapers. They have also been exporting a lot more wood-based products like furniture.
At the same time, China has stopped exploiting most of its own forests in order to protect them and it has closed thousands of small, straw-based paper factories because they contaminated the rivers.
As a result, imports of logs, boards, and wood pulp have grown substantially. Between 1997 and 2002 Chinese imports of wood products rose 75%, from $US 6.4 billion to $11.2 billion. Preliminary data from 2003 suggest that imports rose to $US 13 billion. Volumes imported increase even faster. For 2002, China imported the equivalent of 95 million cubic meters of timber, which is approximately 1.5 times Indonesia’s total annual timber production.
The Chinese prefer to import raw materials and then process them. For example, they import more logs than laminas and they buy the pulp rather than the paper. This creates more employment in their own country.
China imports mostly from Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Canada. Sixty percent of their pulp and paper imports come from Canada, Indonesia, and Russia. Most of the logs come from Russia, while they get their laminas and boards from Indonesia. Countries like Chile, Gabon, Myanmar, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea also export to China. This has increased pressure on most of these countries forests.
Some day, China hopes to be able to supply its own forestry products using its own timber plantations. However, no one knows when that might happen and until then, they continue to import to meet their ever growing demand.
Taken from: Bosques Tropicales Virtual Edition, Year 4, Number 18, December 2004. Iquitos, Peru. Source: Portal Forestal Website.
ParksWatch – Peru: December, 2004