US Law Curbs Illegal Logging

The US Congress amends century-old law to target illegally logged imports

28 May 2010

Shipment of suspected illegal Rosewood logs in the port of Vohemar, Madagascar

The United States is one of the world's largest consumers of timber and wood products. While much of that wood is produced in American forests, about $40 billion worth of timber is imported into the U.S. each year.

How that wood is grown and whether it was harvested legally have become crucial questions since 2008, when the U.S. Congress amended a century-old piece of environmental law known as the Lacey Act.

Illicitly-traded timber

The amended law bans the import of wood products from illegal logging operations, and threatens U.S. companies that violate the law with stiff fines, jail time, and confiscation of their illicitly-traded timber or forest products.

Six months ago, agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service raided the Gibson Guitar company plant in Nashville, Tennessee and seized shipments of illegally harvested rosewood from Madagascar. The famed instrument maker is being investigated for violating the federal law.

Allan Thornton is president of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a Washington-based nonprofit that documents illegal logging activities worldwide.

"As we're following the timber flow through countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and China and back into the United States or Japan and European Union countries," he says, "we became gradually aware that illegal logging is pervasive around the world."