Lacey Act protectionist, says Wall Street Journal

The application of the US Lacey Act to timber is protectionist, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Reporter and political pundit Kimberley Strassel focuses on the prosecution of the Gibson Guitar company under the Act for importing illegal Indian ebony. She said that the company was set up because it was famous and an example prosecution was needed under the law in order to fulfil the objective of curbing timber imports.

“And sure enough its travails have scared importers away from an array of foreign wood products,” she said.

Ms Strassel said that this ties in with the objective in the first place of extending the 110-year-old Lacey Act in 2008 from animal products to include plant and plant products, which was in part to minimise competition for domestic suppliers.

The organisations behind the move, she said, were a “murky British green outfit”, the Environment Investigation Agency, trade unions and “ industry groups such as the American Forest and Paper Association”. The alliance purported to be against illegal wood.

“But what this crew understood was that the complexity of complying with an expanded Lacey Act would discourage companies from importing even legal wood,” wrote Ms Strassel.

Underlining the pressure to secure an example prosecution under Lacey, she added, Gibson had not even imported “illegal” timber, such as Brazilian mahogany. It is, she claims, being caught on a technicality for importing timber that was not ‘sufficiently finished’.

She concludes by urging the US Congress to repeal the 2008 extension of the Act.