22 March 2005

BlueLinx buys illegal Indonesian timber

BlueLinx Holdings Inc., the largest wood distributor in the United States, is exporting undocumented timber out of Indonesia’s critically endangered rainforests, flooding the U.S. marketplace with artificially cheap plywood, investigations by Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network (RAN) have confirmed.
Information obtained from U.S. Customs & Border Protection, an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, proves that BlueLinx, a former division of Georgia Pacific, is knowingly purchasing wood from eight Indonesian mills that have well-documented histories of trafficking illegal timber, according to the Indonesian Department of Forestry.

In response to accusations about purchasing undervalued, undocumented wood from corrupt cartels, the general counsel to BlueLinx, Barbara Tinsley, on a January 21, 2005 conference call hosted by RAN, indicated that her client did not intend to change its Indonesian purchasing policies.
A recent BusinessWeek editorial entitled “Indonesia’s Chainsaw Massacre,” stated that Indonesia’s ravaged rainforests are “disappearing at a rate equivalent to the area of 300 soccer fields every hour, gobbled up by loggers eager to turn them into plywood and planks for McMansions across the U.S. and Europe”. The country has lost 70% of the ancient forest already and, at the present rate, what remains will be gone within 15 years. In addition to Indonesia’s list of endangered species, the longest of any nation, 40-50 million indigenous people also depend on that ecosystem for their sustenance.

Nabiel Mkarim, the former environment minister of Indonesia, recently confessed to the Jakarta Post that the government “does not have a clue” how to combat rampant illegal logging, adding; "It is difficult to combat illegal logging because we must face financial backers and their shameless protectors”.

A team of international scientists from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies confirms the “expansive and accelerating deforestation” of Indonesia’s disappearing lowland rainforests caused by decades of crime and corruption. The Yale report concludes that a failure to implement immediate solutions will lead to “irreversible ecological degradation.” The study, published in Science magazine, also concludes that “stemming the flow of illegal wood from Borneo requires international efforts to document a legitimate chain-of-custody from the forest stand to consumers through independent monitoring” and calls for “immediate transnational management” to end the massacre.

Source : http://www.corpwatch.org