The Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers in the United States have joined for a test case to curb the trade of certain products made from illegally logged timber from China, South Korea and Indonesia.
The groups, which have formed a Blue Green Alliance, have called on the U.S. Department of Commerce to expand an existing investigation of unfair trade subsidies from illegal logging that violate international environmental standards and undercut the U.S. paper industry.
The USW and Sierra Club asked the Department to investigate whether paper companies in Indonesia benefit from an unfair subsidy in the production of high-gloss and coated paper products made in part by using illegally logged timber. This is the first time that labor and environmental groups have joined together to raise an environmental concern in a countervailing duties case.
"The U.S. has a responsibility as a main consumer of wood and paper products to put an end to illegal logging," said Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club. "Illegal logging has devastating environmental and social impacts- accelerating global warming, increasing the risk of deadly landslides and depressing timber prices worldwide. The Indonesian timber and paper companies should not be allowed to profit from this destruction."
Illegal logging produces artificially cheap wood products. Systematic non-enforcement of forestry laws by the government of Indonesia, allows Indonesian logging companies to keep costs unnaturally low-harming U.S. paper industry workers whose jobs are put at risk by cheap, illegally made products.
The Sierra Club joins an existing trade case the USW and NewPage Corp. has before the government that says China, South Korea and Indonesia are unfairly dumping coated free sheet paper products in the U.S. market at prices less than those charged in their own countries.
The real significance of the new filing is it calls for treating lax enforcement of environmental laws as a subsidy that could be met with countervailing duties by the U.S. on unfairly priced exports of Indonesian paper. This case adds evidence to the argument that environmental concerns should be addressed in trade agreements.
"The Indonesian logging case is a prime example of how international trade undermines environmental standards in this country while putting severe economic pressure on workers and their communities," said David Foster, Executive Director of the Blue Green Alliance, a strategic partnership of the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club that advocates on trade, jobs and environmental issues. "We need a trade model that elevates living standards and environmental practices, instead of tearing them down."
