"Forests in the furnace: Cambodia’s garment sector is fueled by illegal logging" 11 July 2023

• A Mongabay investigation has found factories in Cambodia’s garment sector are fueling their boilers with wood logged illegally from protected areas.
• A Mongabay team traced the network all the way from the impoverished villagers risking their lives to find increasingly scarce trees, to the traders and middlemen contending with slim margins, up to the factories with massive lots for timber supplies.
• The garment industry association denies that any of its members uses forest wood, but the informal and opaque nature of the supply chain means it’s virtually impossible to guarantee this.
• This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn was a fellow. *Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from the authorities.

[...] Cambodia’s garment sector is a multibillion-dollar industry that employs some 750,000 Cambodians, mostly women, across an estimated 1,200 factories that produce clothes, footwear and textile products nationwide. [...]

However, this key economic engine is also driving deforestation across the country due to the factories’ huge demand for wood. [...]

Neth Pheaktra, spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment, which is responsible for the management of protected areas where much of the wood reportedly used in the garment sector is illegally sourced from, did not respond to detailed questions submitted by Mongabay.

Academics have previously attempted to estimate how much forest wood winds up in Cambodian garment factories, with Laurie Parsons, a senior lecturer in human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, conducting research in 2021 that surveyed 255 randomly selected factories on the fuel sources they used in their boilers. [...] Parsons added in an email to Mongabay that “We are very confident that around 30% of factories are using forest wood, which gives you a sense of how widespread the problem is. [...]

Hui Yuan Garment, a TAFTAC member garment factory, overlooks the arterial National Road 4 that connects the coastal city of Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh, the capital. It’s one of the many factories nestled in the Kampong Speu segment of National Road 4, an area where Parsons of Royal Holloway found many factories to be using forest wood during his 2021 study. […]

This is just one snapshot of the logging networks that take forest wood to factories. The informality of these loose networks of loggers, traders and middlemen breeds an opacity that renders quantifying the rate of deforestation linked to Cambodia’s garment sector challenging. [...]

Hui Yuan Garment did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

Goldfame Star Enterprises, a TAFTAC member factory, is emblematic of the murkiness that shrouds the garment sector’s relationship to deforestation. […] The Hong Kong-based Goldfame Group, which has operated in Cambodia since 1996 and now boasts nine factories, as well as ownership of 100 hectares (247 acres) of land across Cambodia, did not respond to emailed questions. [...]