Protest at Wellington Bunnings over sale of kwila

Protest at Wellington Bunnings over sale of endangered species

At 12noon on Saturday 2nd October a protest organised by Rainforest Action Wellington will take place outside the Tory Street store of Bunnings Warehouse in the Wellington CBD, calling attention to the store’s sales of unsustainably logged timber products.

The picket marks the start of Rainforest Action's Summer 2011 campaign to raise timber and furniture customer awareness of the issues associated with rainforest destruction. Previous actions have focused on other companies trading Kwila including BBQ Warehouse, Design Warehouse, 4 Seasons Furniture and TradeMe.

Kwila is an endangered tree found primarily in West Papua and Papua New Guinea. There is no current government regulation on the sale of illegally logged timber in New Zealand. Rainforest advocates have focused on Kwila because according to Government research it makes up 80% of illegally-sourced imported wood products into New Zealand.

Kwila continues to be on the World Conservation Union's Red List of Threatened Species because it faces a "high risk of extinction in the wild in the near future".

“The logging of Kwila threatens to make the tree extinct in the wild, contributes to climate change through deforestation and has resulted in indigenous people being forced from their lands. Human rights groups have documented the imprisonment and torture of locals who dare to resist the logging” said Rainforest Action spokesperson Liz Willoughby-Martin. “While Bunnings Warehouse state they source Kwila timber products through Tropical Forest Trust (TFT) and Verified Legal Origin (VLO) forest projects, this does not mean the timber is logged sustainably or justly.

“The logging of Kwila cannot be sustainable. Kwila is an endangered species which will vanish completely in 35 years if current rates of logging continue. On top of this, a significant amount of New Zealand-bound Kwila is exported from West Papua, a province colonised by Indonesia.

“Bunnings Warehouse is planning to slowly introduce other outdoor furniture timber options into the store’s range, but unfortunately this will not be fast enough to save the Papuan rainforest.”

"Bunnings Warehouse needs to broaden their “zero tolerance” approach to illegal logging to include endangered, unsustainable and unjustly logged timber products such as Kwila," Willoughby-Martin concluded.

ENDS

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