End sales of Kwila timber products

John Gillam,

Managing Director,

Bunnings Limited

78 Carbine Road, Mt Wellington, Auckland 1060.

Kia ora John,

As you will be aware environmental and human rights campaigners have for some years been asking retailers who sell Kwila timber products such as decking and outdoor furniture to stop selling these products.

The key concerns that campaigners have are:

· If present rates of logging continue this species of tree will be extinct in the wild in less than 35 years. A mere 17% of the original stands of Kwila still exist and these are under threat from logging. Kwila takes 75 years to grow to maturity and it cannot be grown in sustainable plantations.

· The World Bank has reported 70 to 80 percent of Kwila logging is illegal and the New Zealand Government has estimated up to 80 percent of illegally-sourced wood products sold in New Zealand is Kwila.

· Australia and New Zealand take 60 percent of Papua New Guinea's sawn Kwila. The UN has identified tropical deforestation as the single biggest man-made contributor to greenhouse emissions; responsible for 20 percent of emissions. In Indonesia, an area of forest at least the size of Wales (around 2 million hectares) disappears every year. In Papua New Guinea, because of illegal logging 58 of the 260 known mammal species and 33 of the 720 known bird species are threatened.

· In 2007 the NZ government estimated that illegal logging cost the New Zealand forest industry NZ$266 million a year in lost revenue. Recent redundancies in the forestry sector show how NZ wood producers are being undercut by those who import illegally logged timber including for use in decking and furniture.

· Much of the Kwila in New Zealand comes from the forests of the Indonesian controlled province of West Papua, where human rights groups such as Amnesty International have documented the vicious and corrupt military forcing villagers off their lands and torturing and imprisoning those opposed to the logging. Fifty members of the U.S. Congress signed a letter to President Obama this year stating that there is strong indication that the Indonesian government has committed genocide against the Papuans and calling for West Papua to be made a priority concern.

In the last two years some of New Zealand’s largest retail companies and others have begun to stop selling Kwila products including Harvey Norman, BBQ Factory and Design Warehouse. The European Union and the United States have recently passed laws to stop the sale of illegal timber and the Australian Labor Party has made an election promise to ban sales of illegally logged timber. New Zealand currently has no such regulations.

In the absence of Government regulation to stop imports of illegally logged timber we are urging all Kwila retailers to commit this year to ending sales of Kwila. Companies that continue to sell Kwila are directly undermining the New Zealand forestry economy, supporting human rights abuses, and accelerating rainforest destruction and climate change.

We look forward to your response.

Omar Hamed,

Organiser, Rainforest Action

www.rainforest-action.blogspot.com