![]() ![]() Logs can travel for days down the Ucayali River in Peru’s Amazon region to the saw mills there. Manantay, near the city of Pucallpa, is one of the centers of Peru’s illegal timber industry. “The forest inventories are mostly faked,” she says, “or even when they are not faked, the trees are not being harvested from those areas.” Timber cut illegally from natural reserves and indigenous land is “laundered” with documents claiming it was cut in a concession area.Ībout 80 percent of the timber traded in Peru has an illegal origin Urrunaga, whose organisation published a 2012 report on the timber industry in Peru called The Laundering Machine, says the country’s timber laws are easily evaded, and that lawbreakers have little to fear. The documents, called Transport Guides, are also issued by regional officials. And then you can produce the documents that will allow for the trading of that timber.” ![]() ![]() “You need to identify them with GPS coordinates and you need to identify the species. “In that detailed plan you need to go to the field and you need to map all the trees that you are going to harvest,” according to Julia Urrunaga, the Peruvian director of the Environmental Investigation Agency NGO. An operating plan to log within the concession area must be approved at the regional level each year. Individuals and companies in Peru must be granted a concession by federal authorities to cut wood in designated areas. The corruption in Peru reaches from loggers who cut the timber illegally to public officials who exploit the regulatory system for personal gain from lumber companies shipping the wood with fraudulent documents, to businesses in the United States, China and other countries that turn a blind eye to the corrupt system and profit by importing the “rotten” wood. Millions of cubic metres of wood – tens of thousands of trees – are cut down illegally each year. According to a World Bank study, 80 percent of the timber traded in Peru has an illegal origin. #Rottenwood state park free#Legislation to control logging and better manage the rainforest in Peru was passed in 2000, and the 2009 US-Peruvian Free Trade Agreement demanded aggressive oversight of the timber trade.īut the industry remains rife with corruption today. Peru’s Amazonian region is also one of the most biologically diverse on the planet. This South American country bordering the Pacific has 70 million hectares of tropical forest, the fourth most in the world and the second largest expanse of Amazonian rainforest after Brazil. What is happening in Peru is a big part of the problem. It's everybody.īy Julia Urrunaga, Peruvian director of the Environmental Investigation Agency It's not one company that is doing bad business. Last year, the rainforest absorbed less carbon dioxide than Latin America produced from fossil fuels for the first time in history. Yet today the Amazon basin is experiencing large-scale deforestation from loggers and others cutting the forest for commercial purposes. The tropical forest mitigates the effects of fossil fuel emissions and helps regulate climate patterns by absorbing massive amounts of carbon dioxide. Protecting the Amazonian rainforest is critical to combatting global warming. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |