Every time we go shopping we fill our trolleys with contraband without knowing it. It turns out that commercial plantation owners and food companies are the worst offenders at illegally cutting down the rainforest. These are the same firms that fill our supermarket shelves with everything from beef and biscuits to shampoo.
Commercial agriculture is now responsible for more than 70 per cent of all tropical deforestation, and half of that deforestation is illegal, says forests expert Sam Lawson, an independent researcher formerly at Chatham House in London.
Lawson has compiled a mass of data from government files and local studies from countries around the world.
The trade in crops and animal products grown on illegally cleared land is worth $61 billion a year. Half of the illegally produced crops are exported, mostly to the developed world, where they end up in major brands. This includes an estimated 44 per cent of internationally traded palm oil, 20 per cent of soya and 14 per cent of beef, says the study, which is published by Forest Trends, a non-profit organisation in Washington DC.
The European Union is the biggest importer of commodities from illegally deforested lands, according to the report, making it responsible for about a third of the deforestation caused by internationally traded farm products.
“Belying its environmental rhetoric, Europe’s is the hidden hand in tropical deforestation,” says Saskia Ozinga of forest campaign group FERN in Moreton-in-Marsh, UK. It is followed by China, India, Russia and the US.
The EU and US both have laws banning imports of illegally logged timber, but they have no similar laws to keep out agricultural commodities grown on illegally cleared forests, says Lawson. “This unfettered access is undermining the efforts of tropical countries to enforce their own laws.”
Illegally cut down
Indonesia is the current heartland of this ransacking of the rainforests. Between 2000 and 2012, the period covered by Lawson’s study, around 80 per cent of forest clearance in Indonesia has been illegal. Three-quarters of the products grown there are for export; Indonesia is the largest source of palm oil, which turns up in about one-third of all consumer products.
Other countries highlighted include Malaysia, Bolivia, Paraguay and Papua New Guinea. New areas are also emerging: tropical Africa is the new front line for palm oil production.
The illegality can take different forms. Most of the commercial farmers that supply raw materials for our food and cosmetics do have a permit to clear land, says Lawson. “But often the permits are corruptly issued,” he says, or the farmers break rules that require them to preserve some of the forest.