A U.S. Forest Service researcher studied tropical lumber and hardwood plywood imports from a list of nations known to have problems with illegal logging in order to determine the effectiveness of the Lacey Act.
The researcher, Jeffrey Prestemon, found the price of wood products from those countries tended to increase between 1989 and 2013, and the quantity of U.S. imports dropped. He believes the data suggests that the enforcement of the Lacey Act is making business harder, according to an article from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“Foreign suppliers or importers into the United States have found it too risky to bring some production into the U.S. market,” he told the AAAS. “Prices increased about 30 percent or 40 percent from some of these suspected source countries, and quantities dropped by double that amount.”
His study appears in the January issue of Forest Policy and Economics.
