Mr SK Tham, director of the Malaysian Timber Council in London, responds to statistics quoted in a recent WWF report
The editorial “Damned lies and statistics” in the August 2002 issue of Hardwoodmarkets.com touched on a true and unfortunate situation regarding the unreliability of some statistics published or used by various parties to justify their own predetermined conclusions.
The WWF report “Timber footprint of the G8 and China” is a good example of the use of misleading and unsubstantiated statistics to justify pre-determined conclusions. In the report, Malaysia was quoted to have a 35% illegal logging rate. Environmental groups also used this figure in various other reports. However, most of those reports do not give an explanation as to how this figure is derived. As far as we can deduce, the first mention of this figure was in the book Bad Harvest by Dudley, Jeanrenaud, Sullivan published by Earthscan/WWF in 1995. The source quoted by the authors for the 35% figure was a paper entitled “Illegal Tropical Timber Trade: Asia-Pacific” (Callister), published in 1992! I am amazed that a figure that was first ‘calculated’ in 1992 is still being quoted by WWF in 2002. Surely any reasonable person would agree that in 10 years a lot could change. In the past 10 years, there have been vast improvements in forest law enforcement and progress towards sustainable forest management in Malaysia. Surely there is a very good chance that the figure calculated in 1992 for Malaysia may be outdated? I wonder whether this crossed the minds of the authors of the latest WWF report? I wrote to WWF-International in July to seek clarification as to how they derived the figure but have yet to obtain a reply.
Two reports prepared by WWF Malaysia and the World Bank, published in March 2001, gave a very different situation. In the report “Overview of Forest Law Enforcement in Peninsular Malaysia” (by Rusli Mohd and Amat Ramsa Yaman) it was noted that the average number of forest crimes dropped from 223 during 1987-1993 to about 28 from 1994-1999. Furthermore, in a separate report “Overview of Forest Law Enforcement in East Malaysia” (by Jay Blakeney) it was concluded that the “level of illegal logging in the two states (Sabah and Sarawak) is small (in the order of 1% or less) compared to the legal wood products trade”. The two recent (2001) reports prepared under the sponsorship of the World Bank and WWF directly contradict the 35% figure for Malaysia quoted by WWF in their recent “Timber footprint of the G8 and China” report and indicate strongly that the figure of 35% is grossly outdated and inaccurate.
I hope that the WWF and other environmental groups will endeavour to obtain a more updated source for their forestry data for any new publications and reports. It would be very unfair if NGOs continue to use outdated figures and do not take into account the progress and improvements that have been made by many countries in managing their forest resources. While trying to prove their own point, WWF and other environmental groups also have a responsibility to be fair, impartial and objective in their findings and conclusions and to reflect the true situation on the ground.
