RFA’s Lao service has found that Lao officials are still turning a blind eye to the illegal trade in timber, despite tought new restrictions and loud cries of alarm at massive deforestation in the impoverished Southeast Asian country.

A highly placed source said the export of black-market timber remains widespread, thanks to systemic corruption among high-ranking officials of the ruling Communist Party. “At the time that the black-market timber passes through a district, the relevant officials in that district must let it pass right through—if they don’t they will undoubtedly be punished,” the source said

In Laos, black-market timber is known as “timber with a patron,” in reference to a high-ranking official who can afford to ignore laws and regulations on its export.

In a 2006 article, William D. Sunderlin of the Center for International Forestry Research in Jakarta, agrees that corruption remains a massive obstacle to poverty alleviation through community forestry in Southeast Asia

In Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, “programs…are at least partly undermined by a tendency to favor government, the military, and concessionaires in the appropriation of timber rents, and to exclude people living in or near forests from access to these rents,” Sunderlin writes in the journal Forest Policy and Economics .

“However in each country there are factors that potentially enable a turn toward poverty alleviation through community forestry. In Cambodia there is less central government control than in Laos or Vietnam. Laos has a high level of forest resources per capita. Vietnam has an exceptionally strong record in poverty alleviation that can be linked to its emerging community forestry program.”

Photo credit: Simon Gurney