Red Alert

Criminality and corruption have swept a flood of endangered rosewood exports from Laos and Cambodia which fundamentally violate trade protections imposed by the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Red Alert reveals that in the first 18 months of CITES Appendix II protection for Siamese rosewood, the two countries’ combined exports equalled 120 per cent of the largest known remaining populations of the species.

The only known wild stocks are the 80,000 to 100,000 trees estimated to exist in Thailand in 2011.