Details are emerging from local media in China of an unprecedented enforcement operation in the country’s Yunnan Province against smuggling of precious timber from neighbouring Myanmar
The EIA team which launched the new Forest Campaign report Organised Chaos: The illicit overland timber trade between Myanmar and China in Beijing met in Yangon, Myanmar with civil society groups, media, activists and representatives of international institutions such as the EU and DFID
The report 'Organised Chaos' and its accompanying film expose the scale, methods and key named actors who organise the growing illegal timber trade into China that is wreaking chaos in the forests of Myanmar.
Based on extensive undercover investigations into trade in China and Myanmar, this report exposes key actors and systemic corruption which facilitate trade in stolen timber. In Myanmar, Chinese businesses pay in gold bars for the rights to log entire mountains, corruption allows the timber to pass through checkpoints
The conviction and subsequent pardon of 155 Chinese nationals for illegal logging in Myanmar threw a spotlight on how massive volumes of timber stolen from the county’s precious frontier forests have been flowing unhindered into China for decades and a murky trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year