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illegal timber by establishing roads, ranches, palm oil or for-
est plantations and mixing with legal timber during transport
or in mills.
The much heralded decline of illegal logging in the mid-
2000s in some tropical regions was widely attributed to
a short-term law enforcement effort. However, long-term
trends in illegal logging and trade have shown that this was
temporary, and illegal logging continues. More importantly,
an apparent decline in illegal logging is due to more advanced
laundering operations masking criminal activities, and not
necessarily due to an overall decline in illegal logging. In
many cases a tripling in the volumes of timber “originating”
from plantations in the five years following the law enforce-
ment crack-down on illegal logging has come partly from
cover operations by criminals to legalize and launder illegal
logging operations. Other cases of increased illegal logging
involve road construction and the cutting of wide corridors,
which facilitates land clearing by impoverished settlers, who
are later driven away by ranchers and soy producers, such as
has occurred in the Amazon. Companies make money from
clearing the initial forest, have impoverished farmers convert
forest land to farmland, and then push these farmers off to
establish rangeland for cattle. Other scams include the falsifi-
cation of eco-certification.
Funnelling large volumes of illegal timber through legal planta-
tions, across borders or through mills, is another effective way
to launder logs. In some instances illegal loggers mix illicit tim-
ber with 3–30 times the amount of officially processed timber,
which also constitutes tax fraud. Many of these illegal opera-
tions involve bribes to forest officials, police and military, and
even royalties to local village heads.
Illegal logging operations have also in some cases involved
murder, violence, threats and atrocities against indigenous
forest-living peoples. The challenges already facing indigenous
peoples are further compounded as companies now launder
illegal logging under fraudulent permits for ranches or planta-
tion establishment schemes.
Much of the laundering of illegal timber is only possible due
to large flows of funding from investors based in Asia, the EU
and the US, including investments through pension funds.
As funds are made available to establish plantations opera-
tions to launder illegal timber and obtain permits illegally or
pass bribes, investments, collusive corruption and tax fraud
combined with low risk and high demand, make it a high-
ly profitable illegal business, with revenues up to 5–10 fold
higher than legal practices for all parties involved. This also
undermines subsidized alternative livelihood incentives avail-
able in several countries.
Efforts to stop this black trade must concentrate on increasing
the probability of apprehending illegal logging syndicates and
their networks, reducing the flow of timber from regions with
high degree of illegality by adapting a multi-disciplinary law
enforcement approach, developing economic incentives by dis-
couraging the use of timber from these regions and introduc-
ing a rating og companies based on the likelihood of their in-