Author(s)

Marcena Hunter

Posted on 18 Apr 2018

The recent murders of environmental defenders in Cambodia highlight how international interventions are failing the front-line actors who risk their lives protecting forests from illicit logging in South East Asia.

The murders of three Cambodian environmental defenders in January 2018 hardly made domestic, let alone international, headlines. Sok Vathana, a military police officer, Toeurn Soknay, a ranger, and Thol Khna, from the Wildlife Conservation Society (a US-based NGO) were the latest fatalities in the fight to protect Cambodia’s ancient forests. Their deaths were not isolated incidents: use of violence against environmental defenders has become a regular global phenomenon – a UNODC report on illegal logging in Vietnam recorded 170 forest-protection officers being injured over the course of three years.

At the same time, illicit logging, like other forms of environmental crime, has become complicated and organized. And its repercussions are severe. Environmental defenders are now pitted against what have become well-resourced and well-connected illicit networks.

Although there is increasing momentum at the international level to prioritize environmental issues, action has largely neglected to protect those on the front line. Rhetoric and import restrictions are not enough. Action targeting transnational criminal networks, known to include corrupt government officials and international corporations, is needed. If efforts are not undertaken to combat the violence and corruption that enable illicit logging, it will continue unabated, resulting not only in the loss of valuable natural resources, but also the lives of environmental defenders who protect our most vulnerable forests.

The illegal timber trade in the Asia Pacific region is estimated to be worth US$11 billion a year – equivalent to about 30 per cent of the total regional trade in wood products. Illicit logging in the region is widespread, the major regional producers being Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Indonesia is thought to be the single largest deforester in the world, losing an estimated 1.6 to 2.8 million hectares to illegal logging and land conversion annually (a rate that is equivalent to between four and seven football fields each minute). Most of this destruction occurs in Sumatra and Kalimantan, the only habitat in the world where tigers, orang-utans, elephants and rhinoceroses live together.

In Cambodia, large-scale illegal logging has been identified in the northern provinces of Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri, abundant with rosewood and easily accessible to trucks moving timber across the border into Vietnam. These provinces are also home to the highest density of indigenous communities in Cambodia, who depend on the forest for their livelihood. Communities trying to protect the forests face corrupt officials, including police and military, and are threatened with violence and death.

Illegal timber trade: Regional drivers and enablers

China, by far the greatest global importer of illicit timber, has an insatiable demand for timber – including Cambodia’s prized rosewood timber used for luxury furniture – that underpins the violence against those trying to protect ancestral forests. The exponential increase in Chinese timber imports over the last two decades is the result of a combination of the country emerging as a major wood-processing hub, its growing domestic market and its ban on domestic logging in huge expanses of its own natural forests. China’s State Forestry Administration has explicitly resisted calls for legislation prohibiting illegal trade into and within the country despite engagement with the international community.

Vietnam also plays a big role in enabling the Cambodian illicit timber trade. As both an importer and exporter, Vietnam is an ideal place to launder illicit timber. Timber is smuggled across the northern border of Cambodia into Vietnam, then onto destination markets. Although Cambodia officially prohibits export of logs, Vietnamese provincial authorities issue import quotas for Cambodian timber to Vietnamese companies. Some then subcontract the quotas to smugglers. The same scenario is repeated for illicit timber from Laos.

Protection economies: Webs of violence and corruption

Allegations of bribery and corruption facilitating illegal logging are abundant. In Indonesia the military have been implicated in enabling illegal logging by providing protection services to offenders in exchange for cash. In Cambodia, military officials are regularly accused of engaging in, and heavily profiting from, illicit logging. For example, the Srekor Commune police chief was reportedly found in possession of 446 pieces of highly valued logs on his property in 2017. Likewise, Vietnamese officials have been implicated in illicit logging, receiving millions of dollars in bribes from Vietnamese timber traders as part of a cross-border ‘conspiracy’.

Public officials have also been complicit in the use of violence against those defending the forests. The primary suspects in the January 2018 murders of three environmental defenders in Cambodia include border police and three military officers. Just two days after the killings, forest defenders who had caught soldiers in possession of illegally logged timber in Mondulkiri Province and the Ratanaka Rukha community forest were threatened by military officers with an axe and told they would be set on fire.

One of the murder victims had previously had his home burnt down in a similar incident in 2015; and Chut Wutty, the director of Natural Resource Protection Group, an environmental watchdog, was gunned down in 2012 by military police while investigating illegal logging. Additionally, military have threatened indigenous forest communities in Banteay Meanchey Province for trying to prevent the military from bringing in illegal logging equipment. Another NGO, Mother Nature, was disbanded in February 2018 after environmental defenders were threatened and jailed for taking photos of illegal sand dredging by a firm linked to the ruling political party.

An analysis of illicit timber shipments to the European Union demonstrates how international efforts are falling flat. The EU is estimated to import about 20 per cent of the illegally felled timber in the world. Meanwhile, a billion euros’ worth of legally logged timber was thought to be exported to the EU during the first year of a licit logging assurance scheme from Indonesia. But, although the EU has put in regulations in an effort to import only legal timber, illegal timber is easily sold to the EU under falsified invoices, masked as legal products. These include EU imports of timber from Vietnam that have been illegally sourced from neighbouring Cambodia.

Investigations into illegal logging frequently implicate internationally publicly listed companies. In Cambodia, for example, logging tycoon Try Pheap and the 15 companies he and his wife own have been linked to political clientelism, including allegations of an opaque US$1million pre-election payment to Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Cambodian People’s Party. This raises questions around supply chain management and to what degree powerful political figures, together with corporations, are complicit in environmental crime.

Environmental defenders face a David and Goliath battle to protect some of the most valuable forests remaining in South East Asia. When soldiers and police chiefs are actively involved in environmental crimes like the illicit logging trade, environmental defenders are up against enormous odds, defending the forests with their lives, quite literally.

Import regulations might result in political point-scoring, but do little to protect those on the ground. What is really needed are interventions that break the links that connect illegal logging, corruption, criminality and violence. Responses must be crime-sensitive and crime-proof: they must seek not only to increase the integrity of supply chains, but also to bring an end to the impunity of those engaged in illegal logging, especially powerful government and corporate actors.

As consumers and the broader community have become more aware of blood diamonds and black gold, we should likewise shine the spotlight on tainted timber, as it is costing environmental defenders their lives.

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