After six months of tracking illegal logs from the Congo rainforest to western Europe, Raphael Rowe of the BBC's "Panorama" TV program has found the new EU timber regulations to be ineffective in keeping illegally harvested wood out of the market.
Rowe tracked down the importer of the logs, Edwood, managed by Fabrice Gautier. Despite the EUTR's requirement that importers be able to prove the legality of their timber, Gautier would not tell the Panorama team how he could be sure the logs were legally sourced.
"Under the new EU timber regulations the import of this timber into France should have raised a red flag; this is at the very highest risk of what these timber regulations are about. And the operator who was importing the timber should have been held to account," John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, told Rowe. "It's absolutely urgent that France does set up a proper body to deal with it because if France or other countries don't participate properly and effectively in the European timber regulation then of course it will weaken it and it won't work in the way that it was set up to do."
The episode of Panorama titled "Jungle Outlaws: The Chainsaw Trail" will air tonight on BBC One at 8:30 p.m. BST.
In May, the London-based watchdog group Global Witness found that only 300 of Ghana's 800 logging permits met EU timber regulation standards.
