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Mafia wood

W

Wayne Spence

Joined
Jun 13, 2009
Messages
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Location
Denver, Colorado
FYI A brief in the Oct 6 issue of New Scientist mentions the illegal logging industry has become attractive to criminal organizations. No specifics, Indonesia was mentioned of bogus reports assigned to ostensibly legal plantations. The old adage about what the world is coming to is no longer valid, it has become.
 
I do know the Chinese are starting to allegedly hoard Cocobollo and Ebony. But I really don't think it is a "mob" issue as much as it is someone looking 10-20 years forward and thinking of it as an investment.
 
I have seen where illegal logging was done in a Peruvian park.
It was not two guys with a chainsaw.

They came in with barges, a crew, and big dozers clear cut a swath a half mile in from the river to harvest three mahogany trees.

Probably not the mafia but and organized gang with resources.
 
As you say these operations are more than a couple of guys with chain saws.
According to the UN Environment Programme up to 90 percent of tropical deforestation can be attributed to organized crime , which controls up to 30 percent of the global timber trade. Probably not the guys with roots in Sicily but Indonesia, South America, Africa.
 
Corruption is the same the world over. May not begin with, but takes the tacit if not complicit cooperation of politicians to continue. If legislators make laws, and the executive will not enforce, are they really laws? Or will the tree still hit the ground in the (former) forest?
 
It's just like drugs, if the demand is there someone will take advantage of it. The only way to really stop it is if we stop buying that wood. They've put every law they can think of on the books to stop drugs. Is it working. Not in the least and it's costing us billions of dollars. You have to go to the source, us. When the people stop using, the drugs dry up.
When you can convince people that it's morally wrong to buy from sources of illegal woods, and you make it easy enough for them to find out, the illegal sources will dry up. I know I'm guilty of what I'm about to say but have you asked your wood source if their wood is from a sustainable forest and cut legally. I haven't. I guess I just assume that my friends I buy from or stores like Woodcraft do so. I'll admit however that I've never researched it. I don't use very many exotics but even at my small level, if all of the 15,000 or so AAW members all use the same small amount I use that amounts to a lot of wood, and potential profits for the illegal trade.
 
I hear you John. A few years ago I got a really good deal on exotics from a local woodworkers store. I asked the source of the wood and they replied they did not know. They probably didn,t nor I imagine did the head of the company. By the time the product gets to the retail store backtracking is near impossible. If the salesperson had said it was illegal wood they got a deal on I would have purchased it with that knowledge.
 
The upside is that if you cross them, they make you a pair of wooden shoes instead of concrete shoes. :p
 
The amount of wood that makes it to the shelves of your Woodcraft is insignificant compared to what cooked the rice or provided ash to sweeten the soil for crops at the point of origin.
 
Greed being what it is, nothing will ever change. One of the old lame excuses for not using responsible harvesting it that unrestricted harvesting is improving the lot of the poor unfortunate peasants. However, they are just as poor now as in the past and perhaps even more unfortunate once a natural resource has been depleted.
 
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