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Mother Jones on deforestation in China...

no sector better illustrates the vast reach and explosive impacts of China's manufacturing dominance than logging. At one end are the consumers in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China itself, who are mostly oblivious to the social and environmental destruction left by the Chinese-made furniture, plywood, moldings, and flooring they buy.


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Until 1998, China fed its wood mills trees from its own forests. That year, the middle reaches of the Yangtze River swelled with the region's biggest flood in more than 50 years, killing 3,000 people, destroying 5 million homes, and engulfing 52 million acres of land. As winter approached months later, 14 million were still homeless. The land, it turned out, had no defense against erosion left. Lakes and wetlands that once would have absorbed some of the rain had been drained to create farmland, and the forests that once held topsoil in place had been harvested. Torrential rainwater carried the topsoil to the river and then down it, until its bed swelled with new sediment and the floodwater rose above its banks. As a result, China declared a logging ban on what little remained of its old-growth forests. Most environmentalists applauded the ban until they grasped its corollary: Chinese companies began harvesting other countries' trees on an even grander scale.
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In Indonesia, the rate of illegal logging has sometimes reached as high as 80 percent. From there, logging syndicates plied what the eia calls "perhaps the largest and most destructive single trade route of stolen timber in the world," from the forests of Indonesia's Papua Province (which comprises most of the eastern half of New Guinea), often through Malaysia, where export documents are forged, to wood factories on China's southern and central coast. It's indicative of the injustice perpetrated by illegal logging that when prized tropical hardwood trees called merbau were cut down in Papua in 2004, locals were paid $11 per cubic meter; when the logs reached China, their value increased to $240 per cubic meter; by the time they arrived in the United States or Europe as flooring, they brought $2,288 per cubic meter. Most of the profit falls to high-living timber barons running smuggling syndicates out of Jakarta, Singapore, and Hong Kong. They receive support from Indonesian military and police officials who often invest in smuggling operations themselves or, if not, are bribed to facilitate them.

In addition to its many other devastating effects—species extinction, the spread of disease and poverty—deforestation dramatically speeds up climate change. Not only do cut trees no longer absorb carbon, but they release (either slowly, or, in the case of Siberian fires, rapidly) the carbon they'd sequestered. Thus, deforestation accounts for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions—a rate higher than the global transportation sector's, pegged at 14 percent. The staggering rate of deforestation in poor, nonindustrial Indonesia places the country third among the world's emitters, after the United States and China.

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An end to American and European purchases of products made from illegally cut wood—still retailed by such companies as Ikea, Home Depot, and Armstrong (see "Timber Line")—would certainly reduce the destruction of tropical forests, as half the tropical wood that enters China is reexported as finished products. Even so, about 90 percent of all Chinese-manufactured wood products are consumed within China. This is alarming, for per-capita consumption of wood products is still far below that in developed countries, and is likely to grow as the middle class expands. China's per-capita consumption of paper, for example, is now only an eighth of the United States'; if it reaches the American rate, pulp suppliers will have to double the world's current annual timber harvest. As Greenpeace argues in a 2006 report titled "Sharing the Blame," "The world's forests cannot support either the level of consumption of developed countries, or the aspiration of developing countries to attain a similar level."

Edited to add link: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/01/the-last-empire.html">The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global