In a note from Gavin, attention is drawn to Tim Curtin and The Great “Illegal” Logging Swindle.
It appears that the primary issue concerns the propriety of Australia’s (and other OECD countries including USA and UK) criteria for establishing the ‘illegality’ of import logging.
Australia’s Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation (Senator, the Hon. Eric Abetz), relies largely upon its commissioned Jaakko Pöyry Report (JPC), which ranks source countries of Australia’s timber products, first by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (TICPI) and then by its own assessment of their governance and managment capacity (GMC).
JPC deems the total timber exports to Australia, from countries with high TICPI and medium or low GMC, as illegal or at best “suspicious”.
Under its own environmental policies, Australia has acknowledged that to achieve sustainable economic development, there is a need for a country’s international competitiveness to be maintained and enhanced in an environmentally sound manner. Unfortunately, there exists no compliance requirement to its own Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment and as a consequence there is often no accountability.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Thanks for putting links Tim Curtin and The Great “Illegal” Logging Swindle before the blog because the import / export of native timbers everywhere needs much more than a casual glance as we pick up bits and pieces from our hardware supermarket.
Unfortunately this debate is likely to be overrun by the Gunns Pulp Mill controversy that’s so prominent in the media again this week. IMO we should consider both issues in terms of a region’s capacity to produce quality timber indefinitely with out significant impacts on other resources such as fishing our tourism.
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2007/s2012086.htm
Ooops, fishing or tourism! I’m referring to traditional jobs for the “natives” as a former islander hey