|  Not only is Wal-Mart known for building on presious wetland, "mislabeling" organic food, but they also are using illegal timber for their wood products, paying the Russian mob.
Wal-Mart practices encourage illegal logging, threaten endangered species
Date: December 16, 2007. Posted by WildlifeWatch Desk
Region: International Subjects: Industry, Forests
Global retail giant Wal-Mart is selling wood products made from illegally logged timber which is in turn threatening the habitat of the highly endangered Siberian tiger.
This new evidence comes as Wal-Mart continues to publicly tout its “Sustainability 360” initiative, which asserts the importance of “first and foremost” avoiding illegally harvested wood.
Highlights of the EIA report 'Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers: How Wal-Mart's Sourcing Practices Encourage Illegal Logging and Threaten Endangered Species' show that Wal-Mart’s “no questions asked” sourcing policy, which prizes low-price above all, is having particularly dangerous consequences for the high conservation value forests of the Russian Far East, and in turn the world’s largest cat, the Siberian tiger, of which only 500 are thought to remain in the wild.
EIA’s investigators found Wal-Mart’s footprints around the globe, but nowhere more so than in China, which ranks Wal-Mart as its eighth-largest trading partner – and which produces 84 per cent of Wal-Mart’s wood products. China’s manufacturing sector relies on large quantities of high-risk timber imported from the world’s illegal logging hotspots –including Russia’s Far East.
“Everybody in Russia from President Vladimir Putin down to local officials has openly acknowledged that much of the wood flowing from Russia to China is illegal,” said Alexander von Bismarck, EIA’s Executive Director. “But Chinese manufacturers told EIA investigators again and again that Wal-Mart doesn’t ask where the wood comes from, only if it’s cheap – disputing Wal-Mart’s claims that it avoids sourcing illegally logged wood.”
The EIA undercover team travelled to the Chinese factories and spoke to staff there to investigate Wal-Mart’s business practices. The findings include evidence of 200,000 baby cribs made from high-risk Russian wood by Chinese manufacturers for Wal-Mart.
Investigators tracked the wood supply back to the Russian forest and found the Russian company logging in tiger habitat and making illegal cash payments to Russian police to move their timber. These were the same cribs recalled by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission due to baby deaths. The cribs now continue to be sold in the US with revised assembly instructions.
“Cutting costs should not be an excuse for damaging the environment by accepting illegal wood or threatening endangered species — especially not for the biggest company in the world,” said von Bismarck. “EIA is calling on Wal-Mart to stand by its CEO’s goal to sell ’products that sustain our natural resources and the environment’, and to remove illegally sourced wood from its supply chain,” added von Bismarck.
EIA is a non-profit organization that has been working around the globe since 1984 to investigate, expose and campaign against the illegal trade in wildlife and the destruction of our natural environment. EIA is the recipient of several top international awards including the US Environmental Protection Agency Best-of-the-Best Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award (2007), and the United Nation Environment Program (UNEP) Montreal Protocol Partners Award (2007).
The EIA report points out that illegal logging is not only a serious environmental problem, but an activity that promotes corruption, undermines governance systems, can lead to human rights abuses, and hurts the US domestic timber sector. It then goes on to enumerate the environmental, social and economic costs.
Illegal logging activities, says the EIA report, catalyse a chain reaction of environmental damage. When illegal loggers enter a forest, they are not abiding by management plans, sensitive to stream buffers, or taking care not to disturb any local endangered species. Typically, such operations are after a select suite of timber species whose value on the international market is worth the risk of harvest. Often the only places where substantial quantities of these species remain are indigenous community lands, national parks, or the ?nal remote tracts of wilderness left – critical habitat for far-ranging, low-density species like tigers, jaguars, and orangutans.
The prices fetched by export-quality wood products justify the economics of illicit extraction activities: building new infrastructure, bribing local of?cials and/or community leaders, and creating elaborate smuggling arrangements.
The creation of road networks and extraction facilities in frontier forest regions precedes more extensive logging and, frequently, conversion to industrial agriculture (often through intentional burning). Largescale deforestation not only destroys wildlife habitat, but causes topsoil exposure and subsequent erosion of the sort that ruins waterways and contributes to ?ooding and landslides. Deforestation and conversion are also direct drivers of climate change – deforestation accounts for over 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, more than the entire global transport sector or industrial manufacturing sector.
In several country case studies, illegal logging is ?nanced and conducted by criminal syndicates and ma?as with high-level connections. In Peru, where a single mahogany tree, at US market value could build and staff a village clinic, illegal loggers pay less than 0.02 per cent of the international price and harvest the trees to depletion in one season.
Loggers are penetrating the protected territories of several voluntarily isolated, ‘uncontacted’ tribes, risking catastrophic outbreak among people who lack immunity to common diseases. A 2005 study by the International Labor Organization (ILO) found that approximately 33,000 people were working under forced labour conditions in the Peruvian Amazon, principally involved in the illegal harvest of mahogany and cedar.
"Illegally harvested or traded timber also avoids the costs of managing a forestry operation in compliance with forestry and environmental regulations, permits, labour laws, and appropriate taxes and tariffs," the report says.
Subsequent wood products bene?t from a cheaper raw material source, allowing producers to out-compete legal timber industries. For example, a 2004 report commissioned by the American Forest & Paper Association concluded that illegal timber in the international market costs its US-based members $460 million annually from the lost ability to export to foreign markets, and another $500-700 million from depressed domestic prices.
These costs, the EIA report reveals, have rippled out in the loss of US forestlands and forest sector jobs. As American timber sees a competitive disadvantage in the international market, forestlands in the US become more valuable as real estate than a production forest. In the next 25 years, over 44 million acres of private forestland - an area twice the size of Maine - will be sold to developers, according to a study by the US Forest Service.
The low cost of labour factors strongly in the outsourcing of wood product manufacturing to countries such as China and Vietnam, but cheaper raw material bene?ted by illegal logging plays an important role as well.
The EIA report goes ahead to calculate the retail gaint's footprints. The company's greatest environmental impact is ultimately through its supply chain. As much as 80 per cent of the retailer’s global footprint is created by the products on its shelves, manufactured by many of the largest factories in the world. A typical Wal-Mart sells 60,000 different items; a Supercenter doubles that to 120,000 items, and each of these products and its accompanying packaging requires energy and natural resources to produce.
In recent years, EIA points out, battered by organised labour and corporate watchdog organisations, Wal-Mart has endeavoured to de?ect criticism and reposition itself as a leader in corporate sustainability activities.
The report does not deny that the company’s impact can be impressive when directed towards initiatives such as cutting its suppliers’ use of paper. In 2005, Wal-Mart asked some of its toy suppliers to reduce the packaging of just 300 items. The measure apparently saved 1,358 barrels of oil and 3,425 tonnes of corrugated cardboard,33 or more than 58,000 trees.
Without concrete goals and greater transparency about its own activities, EIA says, Wal-Mart’s purported commitment to “good wood” cannot yet be taken seriously, especially in light of documented evidence that the company’s current supply chain includes suppliers who speak openly about paying protection money to the Russian mob, and do their logging in some of the most high conservation value forests in the world.
http://www.wildlifewatch.in/news/837
Think twice before purchasing any wood products from Wal-Mart, your purchase is the death of a beautiful, very rare Tiger.
Related Resource: risk management
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