Cambodia top supplier of timber to Vietnam

[rooster59]

Cambodia top supplier of timber to Vietnam

The Cambodia Daily reported that Cambodia exported about 50 percent more timber to Vietnam by value in 2015 than the year before, overtaking Laos as Vietnam’s top supplier.

According to official data gathered by U.S. conservation group Forest Trends, the increase came ahead of an abrupt freeze on all timber exports to Vietnam that Cambodia imposed on Jan 18 as part of a crackdown on illegal logging in the eastern provinces.

In 2015 Cambodia’s timber exports to Vietnam shot up 53 percent, from $253 million to $386 million. At the same time, exports from Laos to Vietnam fell 40 percent from $601 million to $360 million.

In a report the group released last year, Forest Trends said the timber Cambodia exported to Vietnam in 2014 added up to 154,000 cubic meters, over half of it consisting of Beng, Thnong and Kra Nhung, among the rarest and most coveted varieties of wood in the region. Kra Nhung, or Siamese rosewood, has also been designated a protected species in Cambodia with stringent export conditions.

Xuan Phuc, a Southeast Asia forest trade and finance analyst for Forest Trends, said most of the exports were illegal, even those that moved through official border checkpoints. Despite the constant reports of loggers crossing the Vietnam-Cambodia border with ill-gotten timber, authorities have never acknowledged the scale of the problem.

But in an apparent shift, National Military Police Commander Sao Sokha, the head of a new task force charged with rooting out the illicit timber trade in eastern Cambodia, put an immediate freeze on all timber exports to Vietnam on Monday.

Source: http://englishnews.thaipbs.or.th/content/147818

-- Thai PBS 2016-01-23

[The Deerhunter]

Before it becomes South East Asia's newest desert. Exports banned from Monday. Tuesday business as usual? That is the way it would happen in some other countries. You know I mean places like in Africa or somewhere else other than here.