Crossroads

A report exposing the pivotal role played by the Vietnamese military in a multi-million dollar operation smuggling threatened timber over the border from the shrinking forests of neighbouring Laos.

Laos has some of the Mekong region’s last intact tropical forests and has in place an export ban on raw timber.

But this ban is routinely flouted on a massive scale to feed the ravenous timber processing industries of Vietnam, China and Thailand.