Today China is one of the world’s largest timber traders. The eastern nation has also become the world’s second-largest producer of paper and paperboard, and the biggest producer of plywood and veneers made from tropical hardwoods. These actions have stirred the attention of ecologists across the globe who have dubbed China’s economic activity as ‘neo-colonial’, as China’s search for resources including energy and minerals, is reminiscent of that characterised by Western colonialism.
Between 1997 and 2007, the volume of wood imported by China tripled. In a decade, the country has established itself as the world’s biggest importer of raw forest products – including logs and saw timber. This vigorous appetite for wood is not likely to fade anytime soon: a 2006 report by Forest Trends, a group based in Washington DC that monitors and regiments the timber trade, predicts that China’s forest imports will double within a decade. And if the previous ten years are a mark of the future, this forecasting may come to light.
There are a few statistics that capture China’s recent impact on the world’s forest and timber industry, as well as the Western consumerism that has subsidised it:
A year before the Forest Trends report, in 2005, China had become the world’s single largest exporter of wood products, valued at more than $17 billion. In the same year China’s most regular big-spender was the United States, which bought approximately $7.9 billion worth – that’s over a third of the Chinese wood market expected sales.
China now makes about a 30% of the world’s furniture, which is a curious statistic if you consider Western spending power. Between 2000 and 2006, Chinese exports of furniture rose from 91 million pieces to 248 million, with the lion’s share – that of about 40% – going directly to the US. Finally, between 1997 and 2005, imports of wood products form China to the United States and the European Union rose by more than 700 per cent.
These figures are remarkable, consider the finite resources which the timber industry work with, and the stringent parameters that global organisations should be implementing to ensure an anti-monopoly economy. And with China now set as Gabon’s largest timber trading partner, there are scares of what this sort of aggressive market behaviour may encourage throughout the industry.
In 2003 Gabon supplied 40% of China’s log imports from the west and central Africa regions, and China imported an estimated 46% of Gabon’s total forest exports. Today, there are approximately 750 Chinese companies operating in 50 African countries – which equates to at least 7 Chinese companies per country. This economic foundation to China’s relationship with Africa is obviously raising concerns, and the procurement of natural resources with Africa has abided by Beijing’s sole political condition for establishing business ties between the two nations, that being, the refusal to diplomatically recognise Taiwan.
Whether it is considered to be political, economical or industrial, this behaviour is at best ominous and remains as a tentative backdrop for the accusations which have been continually thrown at the Chinese timber industry of being involved with illegal logging activity. And with China’s grip getting ever-tighter around the timber markets, let us hope that these fingers are misguided.,
