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Timber trafficking and laundering
Transparency international
Transparency international
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"Over the years cases of timber smuggling in the Asia Pacific region have involved the complicity of a wide range of actors including military personnel, customs officials, shipping agents, forestry staff, police and port staff. In the Philippines, for example, a citizen-led raid on timber smugglers helped to break up a long-time syndicate involving local officials that had been illegally trafficking timber between the central Philippine province of Palawan and Malaysia for more than 10 years.2 In Indonesia, there has been evidence of considerable corruption in Papua, where ‘the huge scale of illegal logging and timber smuggling… could not occur without the involvement of corrupt officials’.3 It has been alleged that in order to launder an illegal shipment of tropical hardwood from Papua to Hong Kong using false certificates, average bribe payments of US$200,000 are shared between officials in the army, navy, police and forestry office.4 However, corrupt practices can begin much earlier in the timber traffic chain.. They take root as a result of the weak governance of the sector which enables illegal timber to be laundered onto legitimate markets. Problems of governance are even more so the case now that the industry is increasingly dependent on timber certification. Certification was devised to help stamp out laundering by creating barriers through standards. But when governance systems are weak, this dependence on certification — and the trust it inspires — provides an opportunity for timber launderers to undermine processes and ‘legalise’ their illegal timber stocks. The aim of certification schemes is to guarantee the legality and/or sustainability of timber and to verify its origin and chain of custody after it has been logged. Most certification schemes uphold both legality and transparency as pillars of good forest management and are based on compliance with national laws. Corruption that undermines these schemes, however, facilitates the laundering of illegal timber by breaking the integrity of the ‘paper chain’ that testifies to the origin and chain of custody."(pg 1)
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2011
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With permission of the license/copyright holder