Almost 200 wood-processing factories in Vientiane province are producing sub-standard products, Deputy Director of the Provincial Department of Industry, Mr Niphone Xaysanavong, said on Tuesday.
There are hundreds of low quality wood-processing factories throughout the country, but now, according to the Department of Industry of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, wood-processing industries that are not making high-quality products will be closed down.
“If these factories don't want to close, the smaller factories will be made to join together to build a larger establishment for processing wood products,” Mr Niphone said at an industrial wood-processing meeting in Vientiane province, which is underway all this week.
The provincial Department of Industry will decide at the meeting on the number of small factories that will merge to create more productive operations.
Currently only 30 of the 225 factories in the province are producing high-quality products for export, Mr Niphone said.
If the low-quality factories don't cooperate in merging together into larger factories, the provincial authorities will order them to close down.
“Factories that refuse to discontinue their operations will be fined and closed down,” Mr Niphone said.
One of the reasons factories are producing poor-quality products is that they are cutting trees only to export timber, rather than actual wood products, to neighbouring countries, he explained.
“This is against our national policy,” he said.
“Factories are bound to cut trees to process into wood products for sale, such as chairs or tables, but not to export as raw timber overseas. Some of the timber being exported was 5 to 10cm in depth,” Mr Niphone said.
The ministry has restricted wood factories in an attempt to protect thousands of cubic metres of trees that are being cut down each year to supply the factories. This is a new government policy to make wood production more sustainable, and to manage the country's dwindling forests.
Laos also loses thousands of cubic metres of trees each year which are not going to wood-processing factories in the country, but are exported for external processing. Most trees are cut in slash-and-burn operations, while some are culled in forest conservation areas and others taken from rivers or reservoirs when they have fallen naturally.
In the future, the Department of Industry plans to retrieve trees from rivers and reservoirs for processing in factories. “If we don't use these trees, they will be wasted. This sort of wood can be good for products sold both in Laos and overseas,” h e added.
By Khonesavanh Latsaphao (Latest Update May 112007)
The photo had nothing to do with the story. Local villagers were just cutting their own lumber, saw with their own power (hands) for building their own houses, not for selling.
