Jo Van Brusselen, principal scientist with the European Forest Institute and GTTN-coordinator, was interviewed by Deutsche Welle (DW) on illegal logging and related trade and asked to reflect on the government’s as well as the consumers’ potential to put an end to it.
On Friday, DW – the German foreign broadcasting service – published their top story on Brazil’s harsh reality of timber trade. Besides the unprecedented destruction of the Amazonian rain forest, the timber industry was partly responsible for the loss of over 251 lives in the past decade – 61 in 2016 alone. Although the European Timber Trade Regulation was implemented in 2013, conflict-ridden timber is still resurfacing in countries like France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands due to loopholes related to a long list of middle men, potential frauds and falsifiable paper trails.
Read up here on Van Brusselen’s examination of those loopholes as well as on his expertise on how to combat them from the top down – by stronger monitoring – and from the bottom up – through consumer pressure.
Full article by Irene Banos Ruiz, Deutsche Welle
