Illegally logged wood from Cambodia likely ending up in U.S. homes

https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/illegally-logged-wood-from-cambodia-likely-ending-up-in-u-s-homes/

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

133 87 2 years ago

news.mongabay.com

cj3• 2 years ago

If I just built a house, and if there were some definitive test to know the wood came from somewhere illegally, who would I sue?

In the US, you would sue the person you paid (who would then sue the middleman company who sold them the wood, and so on down the chain until the chain eventually ends).

It’s interesting to think what a market would look like if we removed indemnity and limitation of liability from contracts (which allows liability to easily be passed down to vendors) in certain cases. I think that’s how it works in certain other countries.

E.g. what if the liability was solely with the person who sold me the wood (even if they’re actually “innocent” and simply bought from a fraudulent distributor).

I can easily see how it would help to keep all liability at the closest link to the consumer in the chain, but then again how realistic is it that any home builder is going to (reasonably) be able to do enough vetting of distributors and suppliers to know exactly how and where everything was made.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

You likely would not sue anybody, because you have not suffered any loss. Unless you are being fined by the local building department for having such materials in your home, or can demonstrate some kind of loss of resale value, which would probably be difficult.

Enforcement of this kind of stuff has to happen much higher in the supply chain, e.g. by criminal prosecution of the importers for breaking the law, not civil claims by homeowners.

cj3• 2 years ago

It was more of a thought exercise.

But yes, you could sue someone if there is false advertising happening.

If I buy wood from someone saying everything is ethically sourced, and it’s not, that’s more than enough for a lawsuit.

The “damage” I suffered is that now I need to rebuild my house because it doesn’t use the wood I thought I bought. (Obviously no one would do that in practice, but that’s how these lawsuits work)

AlotOfReading• 2 years ago

I would assume there'd be an actionable warranty of merchantability attached to the sale. The wood can't be fit for sale if the seller doesn't have a legal claim to the product.

kbelder• 2 years ago

If you sell your house, would the new owner be able to sue you, then?

cj3• 2 years ago

In NYS, you can sue the seller mostly based on what representations/disclosures they made at the time of sale [0]

If you disclose it as a material defect, then no they can’t sue you.

[0] https://dos.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2024/03/dos-1614-f...

tadfisher• 2 years ago

From what I understand through cursory Googling, trading in illegally-harvested timber is a federal crime in the United States [1], and it's a strict liability, meaning everyone in the chain is subject to penalty via law enforcement. I don't know if unknowingly receiving illegal timber without penalty gives you standing to sue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_Act_of_1900

BolexNOLA• 2 years ago

I am no expert but I imagine "I hired a licensed contractor to handle this" would provide decent coverage for the home owner? Maybe I'm too naive.

jstanley• 2 years ago

Doesn't that mean that even the end customer is subject to liability via law enforcement?

So they're actively incentivised not to bring attention to it.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

So if I find illegal wood used in my house, I shouldn’t report it because I’ll be in big trouble? Yeah, okay. I’ll play dumb.

DannyBee2• 2 years ago

I know a bit about this from woodworking and having friends who deal with exotic species (and are licensed to collect windfallen exotic trees, etc).

Pretty much the only cases they charge are those involving endangered or critically endangered exotics (as defined by CITES). See, e.g, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/gibson-guitar-corp-agrees-res...

Things like underpriced "relatively normal" lumber due to illegal logging are usually handled as any other trade war.

dfxm12• 2 years ago

What were the damages you sustained? That's probably the key question you must ask yourself. Whoever is responsible for those damages would be the target you should go after.

doctorpangloss• 2 years ago

Complex questions. Everyone intelligent has their own journey to, “People have agency, and obeying laws is cultural.”

jessetemp• 2 years ago

E.g. what if the liability was solely with the person who sold me the wood (even if they’re actually “innocent” and simply bought from a fraudulent distributor).

Why would the liability stop with them and not you? If only the last person in the chain is liable, the shouldn’t it be you who is sued by the people whose land was exploited for lumber?

sailfast• 2 years ago

Because you didn't order the illegal Acacia?

It's not like elephant ivory - the wood can come from a number of places and look about the same. As an end user you asked for "wood floors" and you got wood floors, and it was up to the supplier to select the wood used in the flooring, while the supplier is also lying about the source so all parties post-supplier have deniability here, no?

hammock• 2 years ago

If I just built a house, and if there were some definitive test to know the wood came from somewhere illegally, who would I sue?

Or: who could sue you, to return the wood?

efitz2• 2 years ago

Or, who could bust in your door with a dozen SWAT team members at 5am some morning and drag your family out into the front yard in their pajamas, terrified, making them sit for hours. All because you tried to do the right thing.

efitz2• 2 years ago

IANAL but self-reporting would not likely benefit you; I would try to be as ignorant as possible about the wood type and its source. Knowing and not reporting might also be a crime. Unfortunately much of the US federal bureaucracy is more interested in prosecution than in justice.

kazinator2• 2 years ago

IANAL, but if you want to successfully sue someone, you have to show the court that you have suffered damages because of that someone.

If you got the flooring you paid for and it is of the promised quality, you don't have a legitimate complaint.

If the authorities were to seize your flooring because it's made of illegal wood, or fine you because of that situation, then you would have damages.

caseyohara• 2 years ago

If you got the flooring you paid for and it is of the promised quality, you don't have a legitimate complaint.

I would think provenance is part of the promised quality.

dghughes• 2 years ago

In August (2024) the US increased the softwood tariff coming from Canada from 8% to 15% so I'd say US wood corp buyers are desperate for cheaper wood.

It's a big place here in Canada and the crown (aka the gov) owns all the land not owned by private owners, First Nations peoples, corporations do not. The US government hates that so they set a tariff.

Funny there are no US tariffs on Canadian oil drilled for on crown land though. Even Trump said no to that. lol

dessimus• 2 years ago

We'd much rather give away our tax dollars to the military-industrial complex to go get the oil than risk consumers having to pay more at the pump on tariffs.

kspacewalk2• 2 years ago

give away our tax dollars to the military-industrial complex to go get the oil

Two problems with that line of thinking:

1) US is a net exporter of oil, so why engage in dastardly invasions to get it from elsewhere?

2) Talk of military industrial complex is often backed u by how much the US spends on defence. However, absolute dollar amounts are a really dumb way to compare defence budgets. They ignore country sizes, GDP sizes and purchasing power. Now, if you compare defence spending per person as a percentage of GDP, accounting for purchasing power parity, you get a much less flawed way to compare between countries. In other words, it's not enough to compare $100 of spending between US and Russia, for example, without accounting for the difference between what $100 buys in the US vs Russia, and how much of a person's annual output that $100 amounts to. US cracks the top 10 on that metric BTW, but just about.

mlindner• 2 years ago

This type of argument is frankly outdated. The US is net exporters of crude. We only import because of structural issues (for example for California it's cheaper to ship in oil as they refused to allow a pipeline to be built, or for example shipping in heavier crude that's cheaper and easier to make margin on in more advanced US refining plants).

digitalsurgeonz• 2 years ago

what isn't ending up in the west ?

bregma• 2 years ago

The west's garbage?

ars2• 2 years ago

Not sure if you were being sarcastic, but garbage is handled locally. Some garbage is sold to other countries, but they pay for it because they want it, it's not dumped on them.

Zero garbage is just sent elsewhere to be dealt with in some random way.

hadlock• 2 years ago

Cambodia is mostly exporting their sand to Singapore as part of land reclamation projects. Environmentalists are super mad about it because the easiest sand to harvest is from sensitive Cambodian wetlands, which then gets shipped about 4 days south to Singapore.

kristopolous• 2 years ago

Somewhat related, I just listened to this series about Cambodian art smuggling during the Khmer Rouge days. https://dynamitedoug.com/

I hope to visit Cambodia someday (I was about to do it in 2 weeks but then somehow I got tricked into taking a new job :-\).

latchkey• 2 years ago

I've traveled a huge amount of that part of SE Asia by motorbike. Super interesting country.

100% do not bother with going to Sihanoukville or Koh Rong... totally ruined eco disasters.

Frankly, I found the towns in Northern Laos to be more enjoyable, but the roads are so terrible it makes getting anywhere a real challenge and it isn't like you can go exploring off the beaten path there... tons of unexploded bombs.

legitster2• 2 years ago

“They [Nature Flooring] themselves don’t know what it is that they’re selling,” a timber industry insider told Mongabay, adding that minimal testing is done to check the species or origin of the wood.
When contacted, AHF told Mongabay in an emailed response that it “does not use any illegally harvested wood products.” “We have a rigorous supplier vetting and compliance program to verify all wood products are legally sourced. Any inferences to the contrary are simply not true,” AHF said.

There's a bit of a he-said/she-said thing going on here. It seems like it would be pretty easy to verify samples whether the wood came from a plantation or not.

beambot• 2 years ago

It's double-speak. Neither company cares; they're just relying on plausible deniability while burying their heads in the sand. They will change only if there's sufficient pressure (financial, regulatory, social or some combination thereof).

jellicle• 2 years ago

The "rigorous supplier vetting" of any corporation consists of checking which supplier is charging the least.

chii• 2 years ago

Notice they say supplier vetting, rather than "product vetting". Aka, they're vetting just the supplier, and is not vetting the product itself. This simply means the supplier could lie, and there'd be deniability!

luxuryballs• 2 years ago

once the lumber becomes my house I’m calling it successfully laundered

HarHarVeryFunny• 2 years ago

I could see importing some exotic hardwood from Cambodia (if they have any), but why is is cost effective to make shitty plywood with anything other than cheap locally sourced timber ?!

legitster2• 2 years ago

It's not construction plywood - it's manufactured flooring. So you need fancy hardwoods for the veneer.

onlypassingthru• 2 years ago

Because of collusion. Believe it or not, it's cheaper on the US west coast to buy some types of Russian* and Vietnamese plywood than it is US sourced sheets. The US plywood cartel is alive and well, apparently.

* sanctions, you say? what are sanctions?

hedora• 2 years ago

That cartel was apparently involved in Trump's tariffs on Canadian lumber. They increased the cost of building a new house around here by over 20%. We have a few $100 sheets of plywood laying around from back then.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

This reminds me of the rampant fraud in the labeling and sourcing of seafood. See https://spu.edu/about-spu/press-room/Press/delgado-salmon-mi... For a recent example

silexia• 2 years ago

We pass all these struct labor and environmental rules in the US, then just import goods made with far worse labor and environmental treatment. This is why we need high tariffs.

TylerE2• 2 years ago

Doubling the price of everything we buy is gonna be just GREAT for the economy. What do you mean my salary isn't also doubling?

oceanplexian2• 2 years ago

Like the parent I have a hard time processing the narrative that environmentalism is an existential issue except when we need cheap Asian goods to undercut American workers.

I guess it’s a dead horse though since clearly this kind of cognitive dissonance has handed all branches of US government to those advocating for tariffs and the same populist sentiment is well on its way in the EU.

__MatrixMan__2• 2 years ago

Maybe we need the political will to credibly threaten with high tariffs, but you could scratch the same itch by sequencing the lumber's genome on receipt and checking it against a registry of plantation-grown species maintained by companies known to have paid for whatever environmental auditing we require of our lumber imports.

Trying to do that with tariffs creates a situation where only domestic companies are able to break the rules--which of course they're going to do domestically. I don't want to buy things that are harming Cambodia, but substituting them with things that are harming America is not any better.

belorn• 2 years ago

Requiring companies to sequence the genome on every lumber that they buy would seem a bit expensive, especially if they are liable if they get sequencing the genome wrong and sells products produced with illegal wood. The Government could do this as a vetting service for companies, paid through a tax on imported wood, but that would look very much like a tariff. That said, why not give companies and the free choice.

If we are considering domestic companies that are willing to break the law, neither tariffs nor regulations works. A company can smuggle to bypass tariffs, and they can ignore regulations.

orsorna• 2 years ago

I think realizing that you're a large landowner who owns a company employing hundreds of people easily informs many of the opinions you espouse on your account.

greenavocado• 2 years ago

I find it somewhat ironic and hilarious that Americans depend on wood from across an ocean when Canada is right there and is covered by trees on at least 80% of its land

vinay427• 2 years ago

Canada is the largest foreign source of wood for the US, so I’m not sure where the irony is. They don’t grow much acacia or eucalyptus as far as I’m aware.

https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/wood-products...

Aloisius• 2 years ago

Why import at all? The US has more forested area than Canada does.

nsxwolf• 2 years ago

10 years ago someone would be proposing how the blockchain could solve this problem.

declan_roberts• 2 years ago

Don't give them any ideas.

usrnm• 2 years ago

That's clearly stupid. What we should do is use AI, this is a much better idea

washadjeffmad• 2 years ago

I just sold an NFT of this comment.

Cyphase• 2 years ago

I'll be launching my new app, Block Chainsaw, shortly.

kazinator2• 2 years ago

I'm okay with it if it's for guitars. Flooring, no way. That's just going to end up demolished in a decade or two, which is a waste.

WorkerBee28474• 2 years ago

What a crazy time that was. Gibson got raided by heavily armed agents, got wood seized, became viewed as the victims of political intimidation, paid a fine while refusing to admit guilt, got the wood back, made limited edition guitars from it, and sold out in minutes.

ethanmitchell87• 2 years ago

Use DNA and a blockchain to track the wood from plantation to store. This would be more transparent and harder to circumvent. Still potential for corruption at the first stage where it is entered into the ledger but then it should be reasonably resilient.

yodsanklai• 2 years ago

How would a blockchain help compared to a regular db maintained by a trusted party?

ok_computer• 2 years ago

Lol and the blockchain NFTs were encoded urls because a compressed image is too heavy for the chain, but millions of DNA samples, logged into perpetuity. I don’t see how the original comment provides a sincere evaluation of the goodness of fit for that played out solution.

Then what about running the wood genetic sequencing labs in source countries. Explain how these developing countries are going to undertake a DNA based quality system for a highly fungible commodity so we can feel good about wood flooring.

trainsarebetter• 2 years ago

And what about all the illegal old growth being logged in sanctioned areas in bc Canada?

mikhailfranco• 2 years ago

People often associate illegal logging with general environmental destruction, loss of specific species (esp. long-lived hardwoods) and exploitation of protected national parks - which is all true.

The reality on the ground is just like any lucrative illegal activity, such as drugs: it is run by violent mafia cartels. The cartels bribe senior national politicians, terrorize/bribe local officials and threaten communities. Rival gangs often have shoot-outs in remote forest areas. Many poor/desperate young men who join the lumberjack crews never come back. The bodies will never be found.

hulitu• 2 years ago

The reality on the ground is just like any lucrative illegal activity, such as drugs: it is run by violent mafia cartels.

Not always. Sometimes corruption is enough for the business to trive. (see eastern europe).

Illegally logged wood from Cambodia likely ending up in U.S. homes

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