In Cambodia, the prime ministers and military illegally control the forests and timber trade. Profits bypass the treasury and fund their factions in the civil war. Brazil, now the world's fourth largest timber producer, estimates that 80 percent of logging in the Amazon is illegal. In Russia, it is estimated that as many as 12 million hectares are illegally logged each year, compared to only 2 million hectares of legal logging by official estimates. Rising demand for forest products fuels the booming trade, with the developed world leading the way.
Japan consumes almost as much paper as China, a country with nearly ten times as many people.
In the next fifteen years, global demand for paper is expected to grow by half again. Having depleted their domestic forests, many Asian timber companies are moving elsewhere, snatching up timber concessions from cash-poor countries for pennies per hectare. The amount of Amazon forest under concession to Asian companies quadrupled in 1996 alone to more than 12 million hectares. One Malaysian company controls over 60 percent of the timber concessions in Papua New Guinea. More and more wood is going into disposable products like paper, shipping pallets, and chopsticks.