Last week Fairfax’s Tom Arup had a great scoop on the extent to which Agriculture Minister Tony Burke was retreating from Labor’s election commitment to ban the importation of illegally-logged timber.
As a Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry minute to Burke in late December showed, his Department had convinced Burke that the domestic timber industry was concerned bans on illegal timber would affect them, and countries that exported illegal timber might object as well, and retaliate.
The Department suggested that instead of banning illegally-imported timber, the Government settle for “establishing systems that will promote trade in legally-logged timber.”
Inconveniently, timber industry companies A3P and Timber Queensland and timber importer Agora promptly released a statement contradicting the Department’s position and calling on Burke to fulfil the commitment properly. “It’s time the government lives up to its promise to stop illegal timber entering Australia; it’s bad for our own timber industry and for the public at large,” said Timber Queensland CEO, Rod McInnes, said.
Big timber users like Freedom, Ikea and Bunnings have also previously called for ban on imports.
Oh well, some days the stakeholders don’t play fair.
Burke’s response to the article was to argue — and he has a point — that the identification of illegally-logged timber, which is a fairly important pre-requisite for preventing its importation, was difficult. “Unfortunately, illegally-logged timber doesn’t come with an identification sticker,” Burke said. “A piece of illegally-logged kwila (merbau) timber can look exactly the same as a legally logged piece. Without that knowledge, the only option would be a blanket ban on all imports — including the 91% of timber imports believed to be logged legally.”
Oddly enough, Eric Abetz, Burke’s predecessor as Forestry Minister said almost exactly the same thing before the last election.
Burke says his Department is working on agreements with PNG and Indonesia and hopes to have agreements in place with China and Malaysia. “We still aren’t in a point of being able to deliver until you get through the countries where the timber’s being processed, and that’s why the agreement with China is so important,” Burke told a surprisingly well-briefed Grant Goldman on 2SM last Thursday.
Funny thing is, under the Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, Australia will rely heavily on importing carbon permits from countries like Indonesia and PNG. Much has been said of the idea of permits based on trading off reductions in logging in those countries for Australian cash.
The Coalition’s “CPRS Intensity” model from Frontier Economics relies even more heavily on buying in foreign permits so that we can actually increase our emissions under a target intended to be aimed at lowering our emissions.
Timber is an actual physical product that can be tracked and monitored from its felling through processing to its end user.
A carbon permit is nothing — a slip of paper or an electronic transaction certifying that a tonne of carbon has been saved somewhere in a forest.
If we can’t even prevent illegally-logged timber from entering Australia from PNG and Indonesia, how on earth can the Government seriously expect anyone to have confidence in an international trade in permits that allows countries like Australia to continue polluting more than ever?
This article by Bernard illustrates exactly why the Fed ALP ETS is appalling sophistry. We need a blatant carbon TAX to reduce AUSTRALIAN emissions, not trading to allow somebody else to MAYBE do it right for US! What a dissembling blight the two mainstream parties are! What chance for genuine progress at Copenhagen? Zip, zero and zilch. We are f*cked and far from home.
Alan B.
This issue of illegal logging overseas has a been a straw (or is that woodchip?) mache man for a long time now.
The domestic logging industry have long said we should continue in native (read especially high rainfall, high volume areas of ) forest because at least it means we aren’t sourcing timber from those terrible clearfells overseas. At least we have ‘forest management’ here.
Well the wheels are falling off that assertion if they won’t even close down the rainforest plunder, the kind that kills off the Orangutan, and the home of the Indigenous Penan people. It’s all too hard apparently.
The rationale always sounded hollow anyway coming from the loggers as invariably the logging of old wet forests here was all about the land grab for good tree farm country public to effective privatisation. The vast majority of ‘timber’ produced off these rare wet old forests was hardly for furniture or floorboards – it was woodchipped. Over 8 million tonnes of it per annum off to the Japanese paper industry. Woodchips are not “timber”. Woodchipping is not reduced by banning illegal timber either, but it’s still a damn fine idea.
It sounds reasonable, at first glance, to question whether Australian purchase of international carbon offsets based on reduced deforestation could be convincingly verified, if we can’t even prevent entry of illegally logged timber into Australia. However, this isn’t necessarily so. The existence of very sophisticated remote sensing technology means that it is possible to determine whether a given country’s forests are being depleted and degraded – and to calculate at what current rate this is happening (since there is reasonably good historical imagery available to allow this). If there is clear evidence of a significant decline in deforestation, then the potential buyer of forest carbon offsets pays up. If there is not, then there is no deal. The trick will be to produce international agreements that make clear what a country wishing to market reductions in deforestation as carbon offsets is required to do, but this is not impossible.
Remote sensing technology is not much help with illegal logging, however. Nor, in some cases very close to Australia, is it really all that clear that illegal logging is any worse than what is generally classified as legal logging in these countries, in terms of forest outcomes: poor control and supervision of these technically legal operations by the relevant forest agencies is the reason. Even if Australia was to import only timber that has been certified via rigorous chain-of-custody processes – which are potentially available – this would make virtually no difference to the aggregate amount of unsustainable and unacceptable logging going on in these countries, because there are plenty of other customers who will buy logs or timber with no conditions attached. We are far too small a timber and log market to make any difference, so the only result of giving priority to bans would be a feel-good factor in Australia, not any material difference in forest outcomes.
Of course, if Australia really did want to purchase significant reduced deforestation carbon offsets from our neighbours, and was prepared to invest with those countries in setting up the necessary monitoring systems to measure progress, this would do far more for incentives for the supplier country to address logging (illegal or legal) practices, as part of the strategy needed to reduce forest loss and degradation:- the money involved in that market would dwarf anything in the log and timber sales sector, and has the potential to genuinely change incentives in supplier countries. So, we should concentrate on trying to do something that will work at the necessary scale to make a real difference: in other words, do something that really is good, rather than something which merely looks good.
TomMcL beat me to a similar point. Stop importing timber, all timber, unless rigorous and verifiable certification (ha!) demonstrates its bona fides origin (double HA!) and, more to the point, STOP EXPORTING woodchips. The industry began in the 70s on a lie that it was only using detritus from yer akshal timber industry. How much proof have we had since, at least up until yesterday evening, that timber quality logs are chipped? Eucalypt logs, which produce the best paper, and building timber, and v eneer, and .. and any other damn purpose yet devised for wood.
Developers at Canary Wharf & Isle of Dogs have removed, with massive difficulty, eucalypts that have been holding up London wharves for 200 years, harder today than when they were felled.
ANybody ever tried to knock down a bush timber shed? Was the old gum wood weaired by years? Doubtful, it being one of the few timbers (oak, and to a lesser extent, yew & ash) that just becomes harder and more resilient.
Here endeth the sermon on the greatest wood ever to leap from the ground. A codicil – Young, Goulbourn and a couple of inland NSW towns used the sewage effluent back in the 70/80s for plain old E, Gunni plantations – they achieved growth rates exceeding those weeds of the N Europe, planted when the Kultur Kringe was our gold standard, Sitka and Spruce.
Funny dat, hooda thunk Oz trees would grow here?