"The most widely traded illegal wild product in the world today is rosewood, an endangered hardwood prized for its use in traditional Chinese furniture. An e360 investigation follows the trail of destruction and corruption from the forests of Madagascar to furniture showrooms in China."
"Fampotakely, a sandy village in northeast Madagascar, at first seems an unlikely destination for migrants. It has no hospital, no secondary school, no electricity, and limited well water. Yet its population has exploded to 5,000 in recent years. A few of the houses, usually made from dried palm leaves and stalks, now have concrete foundations and solar panels. Fampotakely’s relative wealth is due to its strategic location in the illegal timber trade: it’s downriver from Masoala National Park, home to some of the world’s most valuable rosewood.
For the last decade, men from all over the region have gone into the park’s dense forests to work as loggers, a job that pays well by local standards. They cut down the massive trees, carve grooves in the logs, and use climbing vines to drag them to the nearest waterway. With rafts made from other felled trees, they use bamboo poles to float the precious hardwood toward Fampotakely and other villages along the Indian Ocean coastline.
Traffickers have to find something to do with the wood while they wait for a ship to come collect it, especially now that various laws and treaties have outlawed the rosewood trade. In Fampotakely, they bury much of the wood in the sand. Indeed, one cannot walk far in the village without seeing the rounded tops of rosewood logs emerging from the ground like little submarines. And there’s even more rosewood underwater: The inlets and estuaries around Fampotakely are blood red from all the rosewood being stored in them. Underwater storage is in fact preferable, as it prevents rot."
Sandy Ong and Edward Carver report for Yale Environment 360 January 29, 2019.
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