JATAN 2020 Market Campaign against Sarawak & Tasmania Plywood (Report)

Introduction:

Logging natural forests for plywood products used in construction in Japan has been destroying irreplaceable, high conservation value ecosystems and is also implicated in the theft of indigenous lands and the dispossession of indigenous peoples in Sarawak, Malaysia.

Notorious Sarawak logging companies have also been moving into other locations as the natural forests of Sarawak have been annihilated by runaway logging. One such location is Tasmania, Australia where there is a history of community unrest over unacceptable logging of high conservation value forests in which subsidiaries of Sarawak companies have become entangled.

Previous reports from JATAN and Markets For change published in 2016, 2017 and 2018 extensively outlined the issues and impacts in Sarawak1. We began an ongoing process of informing companies in Japan’s housing industry supply chain, requesting that attention be given to the problematic origins of the plywood products they were using and that they therefore implement procurement policies that would guard against environmental and social abuses in the sourcing location.

For more details please visit the following link.

Get access to our previous reports here.