Op-Ed / / 06.02.25
Foreign Affairs Op-ed: The War on Trees
Note: This op-ed was originally published in Foreign Affairs and was authored by Justyna Gudzowska, Executive Director of The Sentry, and Laura Ferris, Director of Illicit Finance Policy at The Sentry.
In January 2020, the body of a beloved nature guide who had dedicated his life to protecting the monarch butterfly was found dead in a well in Michoacán, Mexico. Days later, the body of a second guide who worked at the same UNESCO World Heritage park in the Sierra Madre mountains was discovered. What these men had in common, according to those who knew them, is that they spoke out against drug cartels engaged in illegal logging in the mountains.
Thousands of miles away, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Virunga National Park, another UNESCO World Heritage site, armed rebel groups make $28 million each year by converting trees into charcoal, also known as “black gold.” More than 200 park rangers have lost their lives in the effort to protect natural resources in Virunga from predation.
Around the world, nefarious state and nonstate actors are extracting enormous value from forests to fund their operations. The unlawful clearing of land and the harvest, transport, purchase, and sale of timber and related commodities have long been dismissed as a niche concern of environmental activists. But this is a mistake. Although unsustainable deforestation imperils the environment, illegal logging also poses an outsize—and underacknowledged—geopolitical threat. Environmental crime constitutes a growing economic and national security threat to the United States and countries around the world. Yet Washington has largely ignored illegal logging’s role in its fight against transnational criminal organizations, drug cartels, terrorists, and rogue regimes, as well as China’s part in this illicit trade.
Thankfully, the blueprint for fighting transnational crime already exists: better cooperation among governments, increased enforcement, more transparent supply chains, public-private partnerships, and most important, following the money. But until governments treat illegal logging with the seriousness it requires, the world’s worst actors will continue to finance themselves by chopping down trees.
MONEY GROWS ON TREES
Illegal logging is the third most lucrative transnational crime, after counterfeiting and narcotics trafficking, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and is “the most profitable natural resource crime on the planet.” Interpol and the United Nations Environment Program have estimated that 15 to 30 percent of the global timber trade is illegal. In tropical countries in the Amazon, the Congo basin, and across Southeast Asia, the figure is thought to be much higher, reaching 50 to 90 percent. In the Congo basin rainforest, Congolese government officials have explained that nearly all logging is “in some fashion illegal,” according to The New York Times. In 2024, CBP reported that forestry crime generated an estimated $157 billion in profits per year worldwide. It also costs source governments, some of which depend on foreign aid, billions in lost revenue annually.
Today, the revenues generated by illegal logging may be higher: the growth rate of environmental crime, as estimated by the UN Environment Program and Interpol, is five to seven percent annually, or two to three times faster than the global economy. The actual revenue generated in 2025 could be more than $250 billion. That these estimates remain so ambiguous is itself a reflection of the extent to which illegal logging has been insufficiently prioritized and studied by international organizations and governments.
Organized illicit actors drive the plunder of large swaths of the forest because it is relatively easy to generate funds and launder the dirty proceeds. Like gold, another natural resource often illegally extracted and traded by criminal groups, wood’s origins and certifications can be falsified, making it possible to pass off illegally sourced timber as legitimate. Through this process of “timber laundering,” criminal actors make illicit wood appear legal by misidentifying the species, mislabeling the origin, or otherwise falsifying trade records, enabling it to be mingled with legal timber, after which it enters international trade and can be sold. Another trick, known as “double laundering,” moves logging revenue into seemingly legitimate investments, such as real estate, in order to obfuscate its origin. Central American drug traffickers, for example, engage in “narco cattle ranching” where they establish cattle ranches on land they illegally deforest to facilitate their illicit drug trade and launder their drug proceeds. For such a lucrative activity, the risk of getting caught is relatively low because environmental crime investigations are not prioritized and criminal penalties are a fraction of those for other transnational crimes such as drug trafficking.
Legitimate businesses are hurt by these practices. The American Forest and Paper Association found that illegally felled trees decrease world timber prices for licit producers by as much as 16 percent, which “significantly affects the ability of U.S. producers to export.” Businesses that rely on the timber industry, meanwhile, face legal, operational, and reputational risks when illegal timber makes its way into supply chains. The Environmental Investigation Agency reported in 2023 that Home Depot purchased from an importer more than 1.2 million doors that were manufactured with illegally sourced wood from Equatorial Guinea and misidentified as coming from the Republic of the Congo, in apparent violation of the U.S. Lacey Act. (The act prohibits the import of illegally harvested timber and related products and requires importers to accurately declare the origin of imported wood). Ikea faced similar scrutiny a few years prior, when the British environmental watchdog Earthsight accused the Swedish company of using illegally logged wood from Ukraine to make chairs. Both companies had reason to worry about their opaque supply chains: in 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice fined Lumber Liquidators more than $13 million for purchasing hardwoods made in China that were manufactured mostly from illegally sourced Russian wood, at the time the largest fine ever for violating the Lacey Act. Banks that provide financing to businesses that rely on wood sourced from tropical locations or work with clients with an established pattern of activity related to illegal deforestation face risks as well.
WOODEN WEAPONS
Illegal logging is often intertwined with international conflict. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU quickly banned Russian and Belarusian wood products so that Moscow could not underwrite its war effort with funds from the international logging trade, which generated nearly $14 billion for Russia in 2021 alone. The United Kingdom followed suit with bans of its own, and the United States imposed various sanctions, including on the Kremlin-linked Wagner paramilitary company, which secured a 30-year timber concession in the Central African Republic with an estimated value of two million euros per year. As U.S. Customs and Border Protection put it, the “illegal timber trade is soaked with blood.”
Indeed, sanctioned cartels and terrorist groups have repeatedly turned to forests as a source of funding. Mexican cartels, for instance, use illegally logged timber to finance trade with Chinese manufacturers of fentanyl precursors in a natural resources trade–based money laundering scheme. Ex-guerrilla groups in Colombia razed swaths of the Amazon rainforest to support illicit operations. To fund insurgencies, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Mozambique engaged in illegal logging, and the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab cut down acacia trees for charcoal, a trade the U.S. Treasury estimated was worth as much as $20 million a year in sales and taxes. In Mali, the al-Qaeda affiliate Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam capitalized on the illegal trade of endangered rosewood by controlling access to the forests.
The U.S. government has been aware of this for years. In 2021 the U.S. Department of the Treasury described timber as a “significant” source of funding for the Myanmar military junta and sanctioned MTE, Myanmar’s state-owned timber company. Following a UN Security Council resolution in 2003 banning the import of round logs and timber products from Liberia, then ruled by President Charles Taylor, President George W. Bush issued an executive order acknowledging that the illicit trade was linked to arms trafficking and perpetuating conflicts in Liberia and “throughout West Africa.” And in 2012, a similar ban was issued on Somali charcoal.
These actions by the United States are, of course, welcome, but they are insufficient and demonstrate that illegal logging is most often thought of as a byproduct of another illicit activity. Until the exploitation of forests (and other natural resources) is seen as a national security threat in and of itself, illegal logging and the crimes that often accompany it will continue to weaken legitimate governments, prop up despots, and destabilize regions.