Vietnam's forests were once deemed endangered. There is little left now to worry about. The timber industry, having laid waste to the country's green cover as well as that in neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, has set its sights farther afield.
According to several estimates, 60 percent of Vietnam's forest cover was destroyed during the Vietnam War which ended in 1975. Half of the remainder has vanished since then, thanks to human activity.
Households foraging for firewood, poachers, slash-and-burn cultivators and rapid urbanisation as well as industry's insatiable hunger have been eating away at what was left. Government figures show that more than 2,000 hectares (about 5,000 acres) of forests were destroyed last year alone in Vietnam. The authorities are waging a losing battle against powerful marauders.
"Despite a fall in the number of cases uncovered, timber trafficking by several smuggling rings intensified in 2005," says agriculture ministry official Do Tri Cuong. "The smugglers don't shirk from attacking forest rangers, three of whom were killed and eight wounded last year," Cuong says. "Official figures only show the tip of the iceberg of timber trafficking."
Experts say all of Southeast Asia's forests are threatened. "It's very hard to speak at a country specific level, it's more a regional trade issue," says Fergus MacDonald of the conservation group WWF in Hanoi. Having finished with forests nearer home, Vietnamese traffickers crossed over to Laos and Cambodia, where age-old trees have gradually disappeared, mostly with the complicity of local officials. "In Laos, there's no management plan, there's no harvesting map, there's no boundaries," says a foreign businessman, requesting anonymity.
Until three or four years ago, he says, "a Vietnamese logging company would have a permit from some government offices saying everything between that river and this one can be cut. And there was nobody there to check what the company was doing." Today, half the timber trade in Vietnam is illegal, he says. The raw material is being sourced from elsewhere -- Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar or Papua New Guinea.
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http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Timber_Industry_Looks_Farther_Afield_After_Ravaging_Vietnam.html
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