A team of journalists from five Latin American countries investigated how groups of timber traffickers manage to steal and process timber from the Amazon. Illegally-sourced timber from Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Colombia are incorporated into the international market with falsified official documents that are almost never verified. Timber traffickers are now pursuing new species of trees, but the countries’ governments do very little to protect the species.
Globally, illegal timber trafficking is an industry worth more than $50 billion, according to the UN Environment Programme, and represents up to 30 percent of the timber sold around the world. The United States and China are the most frequent destinations of the illegally-sourced timber.
— source news.mongabay.com | 12 Nov 2018