Forests and forestry
Forest products
28 wood processing factories ordered to shut down
The Ministry of Industry and Commerce has ordered the closure of 28 wood processing factories located near and inside forest areas by next month. The ministry on November 28 issued a notification requiring the immediate removal or closure of 28 wood processing factories located close to ...
Forestry dept offers assurances, admits flaws in wake of lawsuit
The Forestry Department has broken its silence after a Swedish court last week penalised an importer of Myanmar teak, dramatically calling into question the country’s documenting processes for timber sourcing. In a public statement, the Forestry Department claimed that current control systems should be “capable ...
Banned rosewood trade up
Despite the presence of a blanket ban by the Cambodian government on all trade in Siamese rosewood since 2013, exports of the precious timber to Vietnam increased in the third quarter of this year, according to Vietnamese customs data compiled by US-based NGO Forest Trends. ...
Indonesia ships first containers of timber under EU legality scheme
The first containers of plywood certified as legal under the EU’s anti-illegal-logging action plan were shipped out of the Indonesian capital on November 15, a milestone in the fight against blackmarket timber in one of the world’s most heavily forested countries. Of the 15 nations that ...
ACIAR extends support to forestry sector
The Australian Centre for International Agriculture Research is ready to continue assisting people’s tree plantings in northern Luang Prabang province and will also extend support to the wood processing sector in Laos. The extension in support comes after the ACIAR project achieved success in the ...
Wooden furniture manufacturers beg for support
The HCM City Fine Arts and Woodworking Association predicted that Vietnam may reach $7.6 billion from timber and wooden exports in 2016, an increase of 10 percent compared to 2015. Meanwhile, experts have repeatedly warned of the danger of falling behind other regional countries. Vietnam urged to ...
Nearly $1 billion in forest carbon finance committed in 2015
The inclusion of the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation program, known as REDD+, as a standalone article in the Paris Climate Agreement was widely hailed as an encouraging political signal that protecting forests and other valuable carbon sinks would henceforth be a ...
Myanmar's logging ban feeds shadow economy of illegal trade
Sitting in a shop on the riverfront in Mandalay just last week, Win Nyunt assessed whether it was safe to hide a ton of illegally logged teak in a nearby monastery at midnight. “If I put the logs in the monastery it is safer, but I ...
Agro-forestry-fishery export value up 6.3%
The total export value of agro-forestry-fishery products in the first ten months of this year reached US$26.4 billion, a year-on-year increase of 6.3 per cent, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Specifically, export value was $12.5 billion from of main farming products, ...
Gov’t, Vietnam exchange blame on logging
Cambodian conservation officials spoke publicly for the first time on October 10 about what they described as nearly three years of corrupt practices by their Vietnamese counterparts in facilitating the multibillion-dollar illicit trade in Siamese rosewood. But their complaint comes amid allegations from Hanoi that ...
