China's government must tighten its policies on buying illegally logged timber to set a good example for Chinese companies that largely use wood from unsustainable sources, a government forestry official said Wednesday.
Only 0.3 percent of Chinese forests, or about 1.48 million acres, are certified as sustainable according to international standards, said Lu Wenming, chief of international cooperation at the Chinese Academy of Forestry. Additionally, only 501 Chinese companies purchase their timber from internationally certified sources, Lu said.
"Our domestic demand for certified logs and timber products is quite low because our public environmental awareness is very weak," he said on the sidelines of a forest products conference. "People don't care about this."
China is the second-largest importer of forestry products in the world and the largest importer of timber from tropical countries. It imported 1.3 billion cubic feet of logs in 2007, a 15.4 percent increase from the previous year, according to the China Timber Circulation Association.
Environmental groups say China's demand for wood and the developed world's desire for cheap Chinese-made products are fueling an illegal timber trade and the destruction of ancient forests in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Chinese government introduced policies five years ago governing its own procurement of timber, said Lu, whose academy is affiliated with the State Forestry Administration. If the government strengthened those policies to focus on buying supplies only from certified sustainable forests, then commercial buyers in China would follow suit, he said.
"Certification is a market-based instrument to promote sustainable forest management. It's very, very effective in some countries, especially Europe, but seems not very effective in China," Lu said.
Last year the environmental group Greenpeace reported that 76 percent to 90 percent of the logging in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea was illegal, and that much of the timber was headed to China.
