China Cheating on Endangered Trees

China, which in so many ways has been a devil in world trade, is up to new mischief.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- China is deliberately mislabeling a threatened hardwood and using forged trade documents to illegally import it from Southeast Asia to supply its booming furniture industry, an environmental group said Tuesday.

Greenpeace said in a report that Chinese importers were evading an Indonesian ban on the hardwood known as merbau by labeling it as sawn timber. Importers also used forged documents which claimed the logs came from Malaysia, despite the fact that much of the merbau has already been logged out of that country.

China imported thousands of cubic yards of illegal tropical hardwood from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea last year, Greenpeace said.

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