Wildlife trafficking is the world’s fourth largest form of organized crime, behind only drug trafficking, counterfeiting, and human trafficking. When we hear about wildlife trafficking, we think of elephant ivory, rhino horns, tiger parts, and the like. But so-called forest crimes, which includes poaching protected trees and illegal logging added up to somewhere between $30 billion and $100 billion during the period 2014-2018. A 2020 report by the United Nations estimated that illegal trade just in rosewoods comprised more than 40% of the value of all trafficked species – animal and plant – during that time.
Even though rosewood comprises multiple tree species, world stocks of nearly all of them have been depleted through overexploitation. Rosewood is now protected worldwide, and some 300 species are under trade restrictions.
With a value of as much as $1.5 million per cubic meter, rosewood is at the center of a great deal of illegal activity, government corruption, and controversy. A shipment of 30,000 illegally felled rosewood logs from Madagascar was seized at a port in Singapore in 2014. Those rosewood logs, worth at least $50 million, have been hung up in multiple legal proceedings and disputes ever since and remain in Singapore.
With huge financial stakes, it is perhaps not surprising that the U.N. estimates that as much as a third of the supposedly legal global timber trade involves illegally harvested wood.
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How Traffickers Got Away with the Biggest Rosewood Heist in History
Photo, posted April 19, 2010, courtesy of Dinesh Valke via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio
