How global demand for mahogany and cumaru risks lives in remote Amazon
Concession currently suspended by Forest Stewardship Council has been a major "red gold" extractor
Any day now the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) - described by one NGO as the “world’s leading ethical wood label” - is expected to reveal the conclusions of its investigation into a little-known Peruvian logging company, Maderera Canales Tahuamanu (MCT). The decision to conduct that investigation was made by the FSC after receiving years of fierce criticism for certifying the company despite the fact that its concession, in the south-east Peruvian Amazon, falls inside the territory of indigenous people living in “isolation” most widely-known as the “Mashco-Piro.” Last August, the FSC announced that, while this investigation took place, it would suspend MCT’s certification for eight months.
For anyone familiar with the details, it is somewhat bizarre that the FSC - or at least the company it has contracted, Assurance Services International - has apparently needed so long to investigate, given that the key facts are so plain, so obvious. Most salient of all: that the Mashco-Piro’s presence in what is now MCT’s concession has been documented going back decades, that an indigenous federation proposed including that area in an off-limits reserve established in 2002, that the government ignored that proposal, and that immediately afterwards MCT was permitted to operate there instead.
As a result, the FSC has found itself embroiled in yet another scandal-of-sorts. That decision to certify MCT, first made in 2011, makes their claim to respect indigenous peoples’s rights - and in particular their right to free, prior and informed consent - and to certify only ethically and responsibly-sourced timber patently absurd. Logging in the Mashco-Piro’s territory not only constitutes an invasion of the land that they depend on for their subsistence and livelihoods, but poses an immense risk to the Mashco-Piro themselves because of their lack of immunological defences and their vulnerability to any kind of disease transmission, as well as to MCT’s own workers. That was made clear, in the most tragic way possible, when two were killed by the Mashco-Piro in 2022.
But what, it is worth asking, are the specific tree species that MCT has been chainsawing and dragging out of the forest all these years? What is so valuable across its roughly 50,000 hectare concession that has made it worthwhile to keep venturing so deep into the Amazon despite this controversy?
MCT, it needs to be emphasised, is no ordinary Peruvian logging company. According to my analysis of resolutions regarding exports issued by Peru’s forests agency between 2013 and 2022, it was one of the top three loggers of one of the most valuable Amazonian timbers of them all: big-leaf mahogany, otherwise known as Swietenia macrophylla, or caoba in Peru, and sometimes nicknamed “red gold.”
Just nine companies and three communities - all indigenous - were allowed to cut down mahogany for export during that period. And MCT was easily the third most important.
In fact, in 2022 MCT was permitted to cut down more than any other company in the country, and it was the same in 2016 and 2013 too. In total, over those 10 years, MCT was given permission to cut down a fifth of all Peruvian mahogany for export.
Prized for its beauty, colour, durability, workability and comparative light weight, mahogany’s range extends across South and Central America, and for centuries it has been used for anything from ships and yachts to furniture, panelling and musical instruments. In the 1980s and 1990s a global boom led to widespread decimation and the threat of commercial extinction, and the subsequent decision in the early 2000s to put it on Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
“The commercial value of its reddish-brown wood, renowned for both beauty and strength, has been its undoing in the wild,” wrote the International Tropical Timber Organisation’s Executive Director Sheam Satkuru three years ago.
“When the natural prevalence of mahogany in tropical forests was last assessed across its range, back in 1998, biologists categorized the tree as “vulnerable to extinction”- the same category as cheetahs and polar bears, iconic species that are well known to be threatened,” Satkuru continued. “We romanticize endangered charismatic megafauna, but we often take the big trees for granted.”
Of course, this isn’t to say that MCT has logged every mahogany tree it could between 2013 and 2022, or that there aren’t other species they’ve been knocking down in large volumes too. One obvious example - also highly valuable and now on CITES’s Appendix II as well after its own inglorious boom over the last decade or so - is shihuahuaco, as it is known in Peru, or cumaru internationally. If stock declarations approved in January by the forests agency SERFOR are anything to go by - stocks apparently cut down before CITES came into force in Peru for this species - then MCT is among the top 10 companies in Peru handling shihuahuaco.
But what these statistics - about mahogany exports in particular - do indicate is the wealth at stake. No wonder MCT has continued operating in that concession, and no wonder too that SERFOR has refused to annul or move it elsewhere, despite years of lobbying urging it to do so.
If SERFOR continues to allow MCT to log there, if MCT carries on doing so, and if the FSC keeps certifying it, then the consequences for the Mashco-Piro could be catastrophic.