<
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/04/fake-documents-real-deforestation-drive-global-trade-in-illegal-amazon-timber/>
"“Everyone does it.” That’s how the representative of a sawmill described the
practice of selling fake documents to illegal timber from the Brazilian Amazon
as legitimate, a fraud known as timber laundering. The testimony was collected
by a team from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a U.S.-based
organization that fights environmental crime, during investigations into
Brazil’s illegal logging practices.
With support from the Netherlands-based Center for Climate Crime Analysis
(CCCA), they found that 53,000 cubic meters (1.87 million cubic feet) of timber
with signs of illegality were declared from five properties in Pará state
between 2021 and 2024, an amount enough to fill 1,828 shipping containers. Of
these, 1,521 m³ (53,714 ft³), or nearly 3%, were imported by U.S. and European
companies.
“The findings suggest a pervasive culture where corrupt deals and the
manipulation of legal frameworks are widespread,” EIA concluded in its report,
published in March. “The open boasting and normalization of these alleged
illegal activities paint a troubling picture of a sector that disregards both
the law and sustainable forestry practices,” it added.
The wood tracked by EIA was supposedly extracted from five legal areas with
sustainable forest management plans, which should follow strict environmental
rules to minimize impacts on the rainforest. But when CCCA experts looked at
satellite images of the harvest areas, they found no signs of logging, even
though their owners had declared in Pará’s timber credit system that they had
moved a large amount of wood from those areas.
These credits, also known as forest origin documents (DOFs), are paperwork that
has to be filled out every time a load of wood is moved from one place to
another, including the route from the logging site to the sawmill. Once a
logging site’s forest management plan is approved by environmental authorities,
its owner can issue a certain number of DOFs, corresponding to the volume of
trees they’re allowed to extract from that area. Since there’s no way to sell
wood without a DOF, illegal loggers buy these credits from underexploited
logging sites to cover their illegal products."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
