10 reasons U.S. must hold Peru to trade deal and protect Amazon (commentary)

No doubt there are other reasons, but here are 10 why I think the U.S. must insist that Peru respect the PTPA by again making OSINFOR independent of any Ministry:

1. The vast majority of Peruvian timber is illegally extracted, even though that timber might appear to be legal farther down the supply chain when it is accompanied by the required – but falsified – paperwork. This has been reported again and again for many years by numerous institutions, including the World Bank, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the International Tropical Timber Organisation, the Centre for International Forestry Research, the Environmental Investigation Agency, Global Witness and Al-Jazeera, as well as OSINFOR itself. Estimates of illegal timber percentages have ranged as high as 90 percent. In a recent New York Times article urging the U.S. to “get tough on timber with Peru,” illegal logging was described as “almost laughably rampant.”


2. Despite the efforts of other institutions, it is OSINFOR that has taken the lead – most rigorously, most regularly, most persistently – in exposing the extent of illegal logging in Peru. It has done this by making thousands of harvest area inspections to verify whether or not timber was truly extracted from where loggers, harvest area land owners, sawmills, exporters and others claim. According to OSINFOR in mid-2018, 67 percent of the timber from inspected harvest areas in 2016 and 2017 was “unauthorized,” down from a previous high figure of 89 percent.


3. It was OSINFOR’s independence under the Presidential Council of Ministers that enabled it to operate so effectively. Before 2008, the agency was inside the Ministry of Agriculture, where it was largely useless. It was only after its “reincarnation” in June 2008, following the commitment made in the PTPA with the United States, that it began regularly making harvest area inspections and exposing widespread illegalities.


4. The U.S. has been importing illegal timber from Peru for many years, despite the PTPA’s stated aim to contribute to “high levels of environmental protection” and the Lacey Act Amendment in 2008 banning illegal timber and other products – not just wildlife, fish and plants – from entering the country. If OSINFOR continues inside the Ministry of Environment, it will likely be far harder to stop future U.S. illegal timber imports.


5. Despite this lamentable situation, the U.S. has taken almost no concrete action over the years to stop illegal timber being imported from Peru. Rare exceptions include blocking the now notorious Yacu Kallpa ship in Houston in September 2015, and a request to Peru’s government to verify the legality of a previous Yacu Kallpa shipment which led to a Peruvian company, Inversiones La Oroza, being suspended from exporting to the U.S. for three years. Both actions were only possible because of an independent OSINFOR. Again, if the agency continues inside the Ministry of Environment, it will likely be even harder for the U.S. to take similar action in the future.