The Mahogany Trade

The New York Times has a great article about the mahogany trade and how it is harming the Amazon region.

Furniture dealers in the USA get a terrific price for mahogany furniture:

Mahogany from Peru, it said, was used to craft the $9,241 writing desk offered by the Kittenger Company, a 137-year-old manufacturer in Buffalo. It made the $13,515 entertainment system sold by Henkel Harris. It was used to make $3,700 acoustic guitars, the decks of suburban homes, even coffins.

It doesn't do much for the communities from where it is taken:

Contracted and equipped by middlemen, the loggers earn about $7 a day to sink into the jungle for up to half a year. Many come out with malaria or tropical infections. Some die from disease or accidents.

"The jungle makes you old — the heat, the worry, the work," said one logger, Pedro Rojas, who is 37 but looks decades older.

Even these small bands of loggers need trails, food and supplies. A multinational team of biologists recently estimated that in just one month loggers along Las Piedras River had killed enough animals for 90,000 pounds of meat. The team also found 231 logging camps, 176 of them in areas set aside for Indians.

Some of these native groups, hunter-gatherers from the Mashco Piro and Yora tribes, are so isolated they are known as "the noncontacted." They are particularly susceptible to influenza and other diseases.

"For Indian people, this is a serious threat against their lives, a threat that raises the possible dangers of extinction," said Victor Pesha, president of the leading Indian federation in Madre de Dios.

There's a lot of buck passing going on:

Brigid Shea, spokeswoman for the International Wood Products Association, representing American importers, said the onus was on Peru. "It's really incumbent upon them to make sure before the product leaves Peru that they're comfortable with its legality," she said.

Once in the United States, no more certification is required, and demand for the wood does not encourage scrutiny.

Ken Fuhrmann, customer service representative for Henkel Harris, said that in 30 years on the job, perhaps eight people had asked about the origins of the wood.

"I would say they don't really care," he said. "They just want a good product."

At Classic Galleries, a fine furniture store in Huntington, N.Y., the unmistakable rippled grain of mahogany gleamed on ornately carved dining tables, bureaus and headboards throughout the showroom.

But no one knew where the mahogany came from, said Barbara Marcone, a saleswoman at the store for 19 years. "Nobody asks," she said.

There's a simple solution for this. Mahogany is lovely, durable wood, but it's being taken out of forests at an alarming rate. If you care about the environment at all, don't buy mahogany.