Word: timbers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from being the worst of the worst to being on a par with the worst of the European countries -- Italy and France." But on the issues of tropical logging and drift-net fishing, environmentalists are much more skeptical. Observes Japan's Yoichi Kuroda, co-author of a study titled Timber from the South Seas: "The government is simply talking about the rain forests. There is no plan and no thought to regulate the timber trade...
Logging is only one cause of deforestation, but in Southeast Asia it is an important one. And Japan is the world's largest consumer of tropical timber: in 1986 it imported 15.7 million cubic meters, approximately equal to the imports of the entire European Community. Tokyo has begun to finance programs aimed at replanting trees in Southeast Asia but has not yet tried to limit wood imports...
Environmentalists fear that the same thing will happen in Sarawak and Sabah, which contain some of the oldest rain forests on earth. Chin estimates that careless, wholesale cutting will denude the remaining forests of their commercial timber within as little as seven years. Local officials have given loggers access to an estimated 95% of Sarawak's forests that are outside existing or proposed parks and protected areas. Even those tracts are coveted by corrupt politicians. According to Harrison Ngau, a Sarawak native being held under house arrest for taking part in antilogging protests, some forests have been excised from protected...
Senator Mark Hatfield arranged the Salem session to work out a compromise between two bitter enemies -- Oregon's powerful timber industry and militant conservationists. The industry needs to harvest trees to preserve some 68,000 jobs, while the environmentalists are fighting to protect ancient forests and creatures for which the old growth is an indispensable habitat. The meeting at times seemed overwhelmed by the whoop-de-do of 3,000 loggers sporting baseball caps with yellow ribbons and T shirts with provocative slogans (SAVE A LOGGER -- EAT AN OWL). But when it was over, the two sides appeared ready...
...little to do with the system of guandao, or official profiteering, that permeates Chinese society. On a small scale, leaders at all levels routinely use their positions to obtain free restaurant meals or theater tickets. In a grander manner, officials buy scarce raw materials such as coal and timber at low, subsidized prices and sell them on the open market for handsome profits...