European Pressphoto AgencyAn Indonesian police officer with illegally cut logs seized on a patrol near Tesso Nilo National Park in Riau Province in Indonesia.
Endangered forests and plants don’t get quite as much public attention as endangered animals generally do. Last month the World Bank addressed that deficit by issuing a study, titled “Justice for Forests,” that candidly laid out the problems posed by a “global epidemic” of illegal logging.
Every two seconds, the report estimates, an area of forest the size of a football field is clear-cut by illegal loggers. In some countries, as much as 90 percent of the logging that takes place is illegal. The criminal proceeds generated annually by illegal logging range from $10 billion to $15 billion, most of which is “controlled by organized crime, untaxed and used to pay corrupt government officials at all levels,” the report said.
Strong stuff. And in the World Bank’s view, the problem requires strong solutions.
“We need to fight organized crime in illegal logging the way we go after gangsters selling drugs or racketeering,” Jean Pesme, manager of the
World Bank’s financial market integrity team, said in a statement accompanying the report.
The report suggests that enforcement officials follow the money trail and throw the book at the masterminds behind illegal logging networks and the corrupt officials who make their
activities possible. At the same time, the report says, far more could be done to strengthen the investigation and prosecution of cases and to step up the confiscation of the proceeds of criminal activity.
Experts at W.W.F. and Traffic, an organization that monitors the illegal trade in animal and plant wildlife, welcomed the report’s push for a new, more muscular approach to combating illegal logging.
“Too often illegal logging crackdowns target the impoverished chainsaw operator who is merely a foot soldier earning peanuts,” Rod Taylor, W.W.F.’s international forest program director, said in an e-mail. “Measures focused on where the money goes target the big fish — which is welcomed.”
In addition to encouraging deployment of the full force of the criminal justice system against the timber mafia, Mr. Taylor suggested, the World Bank and development agencies should try to strengthen mechanisms that help keep officials honest.
Ombudsmen, freedom of information, laws judicial reviews and administrative appeals and tribunals that hear challenges against bogus permits are often “absent or there in name only in countries most vulnerable to corruption,” Mr. Taylor wrote.
The challenge will be overwhelming, Traffic, W.W.F. and the authors of the report acknowledged. Still, with any luck, they say, tougher and more concerted criminal prosecutions provide the deterrent effect that has been missing so far.