KEY POINTS:
We ban trawling off wide stretches of the coast to save rare dolphins. We ban the trade in ivory, whale meat and tiger penises to try to protect various endangered beasts.
So why are we pussy-footing around when it comes to kwila imports, most of which, apparently,
are illegally stripped from the ancient rain forests of West Papua.
After months of rain forest-like precipitation, replacing the sodden, rickety furniture in my backyard has hardly been top of my priority list.
But not so the Greens, Greenpeace and the Indonesian Human Rights Committee, whose badgering of major furniture retailers about kwila imports has started to pay off.
Harvey Norman, Big Save, Briscoes, Farmers and The Warehouse have all now pledged not to "source" any more kwila furniture and to sell all old stock by March next year.
Unfortunately this leaves the $150 million a year trade in furniture and timber decking field open to other retailers - including those outlet shops that suddenly open up in old warehouses at the beginning of spring with their instant sales.
World Bank reports say 70 to 80 per cent of the Papuan (both east and west) kwila is illegally logged, so the Government's continuing determination to stop this trade by educating the public of its evils, and by international discussion, does seems rather wimpish.
A unilateral ban in the trade by New Zealand is not going to stop it internationally. But our ban on nuclear powered ships didn't eliminate them either. And a ban But it would show us putting our money where our mouth was. We could also be aiding our own sustainable forest industry.
The campaign against illegally logged timber imports is not only a cause of the greenies. Alongside them are organisations representing various forestry owner and wood processing groups.
Forest Owners Association chief executive David Rhodes says "illegal logging and the destruction of rain forests have unfairly sullied the reputation of all wood and forest products - even those derived from sustainably managed plantation forests - especially among affluent Northern Hemisphere consumers".
An independent report from Crown research institute Scion, for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, dated July 2007, cites the economic impact cheap illegal timber has on world timber prices. If the trade could be stamped out, the price of New Zealand export logs would increase, within a few years by 14.2 per cent, adding $362.4 million per year in increased income.
In other words, for those with a flinty, "what's in it for us" approach, there is much more than just a "save the rain forest" fuzzy glow to seeing this trade stamped out.
This economic benefit is outlined in papers submitted to the Cabinet on May 27 this year. One noted that "illegally harvested wood depresses global timber prices by between 7 and 16 per cent causing significant loss of revenue for the forest industry.
For New Zealand's forestry industry, which operates to some of the world's highest environmental standards, forest companies that bypass the costs of legal compliance represent unfair competition".
Not only does illegal logging have "serious negative environmental, social and economic impacts" worldwide, it is also "often associated with corruption, organised crime and sometimes violent conflict".
But instead of using this evidence to draw an anti-nuclear style line in the sand, the Government went along with the paper's recommendation that "international (and preferably consensus-based multilateral) action is required for there to be any meaningful change to international trade in illegal wood products".
It said that because the New Zealand wood products market was small, domestic measures on the sale of such products in New Zealand would not have a significant direct effect on illegal logging in other countries.
Forestry Minister Jim Anderton emerged from a Cabinet meeting to announce a "suite of international and domestic actions" planned as "part of a wider push for New Zealand to take a global leadership position in sustainable forest management".
It boiled down to more talk. Mr Anderton said "imposing a ban on illegal timber would be impractical and ineffective if it was not backed up by reliable traceability and verification systems involved exporting countries".
He said bilateral discussions with the exporting countries was the way to go.
But these countries have been unable to stop - or worse, are not interested, for whatever reasons, in stopping - the devastation of the Papuan rain forests, so bilateral discussions with them seems unlikely to stop a metre of illegal decking or suite of outdoor furniture reaching these shores for a long time.
Perhaps, sometime in the future, multi-lateral talking will stop the illegal logging before New Guinea ends up as denuded of its indigenous vegetation as our North Island, but in the meantime, why not be the mouse that roared once more, and say enough. Unless an importer can prove its wood is sustainably harvested, it's banned.
Indonesia, from where much of it comes from, could hardly complain. It sends inspectors here to ensure our beef exports are halal killed. Let's keep just as close an eye on its kwila.
