The Driving Forces of Destruction Commercial logging is the single largest cause of rainforest destruction both directly and indirectly. Logging tropical hardwoods like teak, mahogany, rosewood and other timber for furniture, building materials, charcoal and other wood products is big business and big profits. Several species of tropical hardwoods are imported by developed counties, including America, just to build coffins which are then buried or burned. The demand, extraction and consumption of tropical hardwoods has been so massive that some countries which have been traditional exporters of tropical hardwoods are now importing them because they have already exhausted their supply by destroying their native rainforests in slash and burn operations. It is anticipated that The Philippines, Malaysia, The Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Thailand will soon follow as all these countries will run out of rainforest hardwood timber for export in less than five years.
Japan is the largest importer of tropical woods.
Behind the hardwood logger come others down the same roads built to transport the timber. The cardboard packing and the wood chipboard industries use 15 ton machines that gobble up the rainforest with 8 foot cutting discs that have eight blades revolving 320 times a minute which cut entire trees into chips half the size of a matchbox. More than 200 species of trees can be gobbled up by these machines which are currently clearing 320 square miles of rainforest in Papua New Guinea to provide a fraction of the demand of these two industries. These same land devouring machines are meeting the remaining world demand in the Amazon and Australian rainforests. Logging rainforest timber is a large economic source, and in many cases, the main source of revenues for servicing the national debt of developing countries.