The Australian Government is being urged to check wooden furniture imported from Vietnam, after the discovery of a massive illegal logging operation. Source: ABC News
Investigators say logs from national parks in Cambodia are being smuggled across the border to Vietnam, where they are being used in the country’s flourishing furniture industry.
“This is the single largest log-smuggling operation that we have seen for years,” said Jago Wadley, senior forests campaigner at the London based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).
The EIA estimates that between November and March at least 300,000 cubic metres of timber was cut down in Cambodia’s north-eastern Ratanakiri province and exported to Vietnam, despite a logging ban.
The operation was facilitated by millions of dollars in bribes to local officials, with stockpiles located near Vietnamese military outposts on the border, according to the EIA investigation. “The brazen nature of this smuggling is certainly new,” Mr Wadley told the ABC.
The frenzy of illegal logging began late last year, driven by Vietnam’s other neighbour Laos starting to enforce its logging laws.
This left Vietnam’s timber processing industry without enough raw material.
“So it has obviously set its sights on Cambodia as an easy replacement source of cheap illegal tropical wood for its market,” said Mr Wadley
