Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [294]
Aloysius now had a new job, working for a non-governmental organization concerned with tropical deforestation. In the tropics of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands, large-scale logging is carried out mainly by international logging companies whose subsidiaries are in many countries but whose home offices are mainly in Malaysia, and also in Taiwan and South Korea. They operate by leasing logging rights on land still owned by local people, exporting unfinished logs, and not replanting. Much or most of the value of a log is added on by cutting up and processing it after it has been felled: that is, the finished timber sells for far more than the log from which it was cut. Hence exporting unfinished logs deprives local people and the national government of most of the potential value of their resource. The companies frequently obtain the required government logging permit by bribing government officials, and then proceeding to build roads and cut logs beyond the boundaries of the area actually leased. Alternatively, the companies merely send in a logging ship, quickly negotiate permission with local people, carry out the logging, and dispense with a government permit. For example, about 70% of all wood cut in Indonesia comes from illegal operations that cost the Indonesian government nearly a billion dollars a year in lost taxes, royalties, and lease payments. Local permission is obtained by wooing village leaders who may or may not have the power to sign away logging rights, and by taking those leaders to the national capital or else overseas to Hong Kong, where they are plied with luxury hotel accommodations, food, drink, and prostitutes until they sign. This sounds like an expensive way to do business, until one realizes that a single big rainforest tree is worth thousands of dollars. Acquiescence of the ordinary village population is bought by paying them an amount of cash that seems to them enormous but that they will actually spend on food and other consumables within a year. In addition, the company also obtains local acquiescence by making promises that will not be carried out, such as a promise to replant the forest and build hospitals. In some well-publicized cases in Indonesian Borneo, the Solomon Islands, and elsewhere, when loggers have arrived at a forest with a permit from the central government and started logging, local people who realized that this would be a bad deal for them attempted to stop the logging by blocking roads or burning sawmills, whereupon the logging company enlisted the police or army to enforce their rights. I had heard that logging companies also intimidate opponents by threatening to kill them.
Aloysius was such an opponent. The loggers did threaten to kill him, but he persisted because he was confident that he could take care of himself. They then threatened to kill his wife and children, who he knew could not take care of themselves, and whom he would not be in a position to protect whenever he was away at work. To save their lives, he moved them overseas to another country and became more vigilant about possible murder attempts on himself. That explained his new nervousness and the loss of his former happy, confident manner.
With such logging companies, as with the mining companies that we already discussed, we have to ask ourselves why they behave in a way that is morally reprehensible. The answer, again, is that their behavior is profitable to them because of the same three factors motivating mining companies: economics, the industry’s corporate culture, and attitudes of society and government. Tropical hardwood logs are so valuable and in demand that rape-and-run logging of leased tropical forest land is immensely profitable. Acquiescence of local people can frequently be obtained, because the local people are desperate for cash and have