Australia must tighten laws on illegal timber imports, senate told

Australia must tighten laws to stop illegal timber imports and insist on stricter labelling of timber products to track the country of origin, an international tropical forests expert says.

Professor William Laurance, a rainforest ecologist from Queensland’s James Cook University, has warned ''vague labels such as 'Made in China' are not helpful'' to consumers, given China's dominant role in the global illegal timber trade. Although manufactured in China, the products could be made from illegal tropical timber.

Prof Laurance, a former chief research scientist with the Smithsonian Institution in the US, was in Canberra to brief members of the Senate rural affairs committee on the economic and environmental impacts of illegal logging in developing countries.

He said certification schemes such as the Forest Stewardship Council did ''not go far enough'' to protect tropical forests from illegal logging, and mostly applied to timber harvesting in temperate regions. Less than 5% of tropical timber is currently certified as being from a sustainably harvested source, he said.

Prof Laurance said China had developed ''an immense export'' market for wood and paper products, driving large-scale clearing of tropical forests in Sumatra and Borneo.

''During a recent visit to Sumatra, I witnessed the felling of large expanses of native rainforests, which are being chopped up and fed into the world's largest wood-pulp plant, located nearby, and replaced by monocultures of exotic acacia trees,'' he said.

China had ''done little to combat the scourge of illegal logging'', and is estimated to have imported between 16-24 million m³ of illegal timber each year over the past decade.