Figure 10.8: Trade in tropical timber. Most of the consumer demand for tropical timber is in North America, Europe, and Japan. Increasingly large quantities of tropical timber sold to China are made into furniture, plywood, and flooring, which are then sold to consumers in the developed world. The trade shown on the map is mostly legal, but much of the wood that fuels China’s wood-processing industries is harvested illegally in Southeast Asia.

[Sources consulted: Annual Review and Assessment of the World Timber Situation 2010 (Yokohama, Japan: International Tropical Timber Organization, 2010), pp. 13–15, at http://www.itto.int/annual_review/; Sam Lawson and Larry MacFaul, “Illegal Logging and Related Trade: Indicators of the Global Response” (London: Chatham House, 2010), at http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/chatham_house_illegallogging_2010.pdf]