Guarding West Africa’s Forests: Exploring Ways to Put an End to Illegal Chinese Timber Trade

Together, the United States and China import $40 billion worth of timber products each year, quite a bit of which is harvested illegally from West Africa’s rapidly shrinking forests. But cracking down on this illicit trade is extremely difficult given that many of the region’s governments are actively complicit.

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an NGO based in the U.S. and UK, recently traced how Chinese merchants trafficked rosewood timber from the forests of Equatorial Guinea back to China and eventually, all the way to store shelves at Home Depot in the United States.

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by Eric Olander

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