OUGD505 STUDIO BRIEF TWO - RESEARCH - LOGGING IN THE AMAZON

It's gotten to a point in the Brasilian Amazon that illegal logging is accepted as the norm, with 60-80% of all logging in the Brasilian Amazon thought to be done illegally.
With forests in Southeast Asia and Central Africa depleting, more larger companies are turning to the Amazon for their supply of wood, for example, Samauma is being exploited to make cheap plywood for constructions industries in the US, Japan and also Europe.
As logging occurs in the depth of the rainforest, workers often use false permits, ignoring the limitations of legal permits, cutting down species which are protected by the law, and also stealing from protected and indigenous land. Often these things go unnoticed as they are only ever small to medium operations and being so deep in the rainforest they go unnoticed by IBAMA.
Sometimes, legal logging organisations provide a cover for the illegal, with wood being cut illegally upstream, and then floated downstream to the organisations. When they pass a certain point, they are then 'legalised' with forged documents and claim to of been cut from the legal organisation site.
Greenpeace has developed a way to track the illegal logs back to the exporting companies using ultraviolet paint.
The largest IBAMA team in the Amazon basin only has one inspector for an area around the size of Switzerland, and can therefore only detect around 10% of illegal logging in the Amazon because of this lack of operatives and funding.
Transnational logging giant WTK has also recently bought 313,000 hectares of land, and 150,000 of this land illegally overlapped with indigenous territory.
Selecting valuable trees to cut down also changes the structure of the forest, as in cutting them down other trees are damaged in the process. Logging companies cut down 10-40% of live biomass of a forest area, and therefore open up the canopy from 14-50%. This in turn makes the rainforest more susceptible to forest fires. Opening up the forest also leads to more destruction taking place such as hunting, road building, and clearing for agriculture.
However, despite the high rate of illegal logging, important timber importing countries such as the US, UK, Spain, France and Japan have taken few measures to ensure their timber isn't illegally sourced.

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