Bloodwood: Rosewood Trafficking Is Destroying This National Park | National Geographic

Cambodia was once cloaked with forests. This is what it looks like today: more than half of the country's trees have been clear-cut. Foreign appetites for red timbers are driving the destruction, and none is prized more than this Siamese rosewood. In China, rosewood furniture has become a status event, the best cuts of wood selling for up to 80 thousand dollars a ton. Exports have also increased to the West, what's used to make coffee tables and fancy guitars.

This is where all gets made in here. Okay, huge demand has attracted criminal syndicates that will go to any lengths to protect their profits. As Cambodia's timber stocks run out, they have moved into a new frontier: national parks inside neighboring Thailand. Our bloggers are raising virgin swathes of forests that are also home to threatened species, including the Asian elephant, tigers, and bears. But they will be stopped if this man has anything to do with it.

"I'ma get out for a gift cap goalie Mike McGee on the iron cat cupola," which I publish, and Simone is the director of Top Lone National Park, part of a complex that is UNESCO World Heritage status. Let us accompany his Rangers on an operation to flush out the loggers. "Let them be like rotten bad. Didn't you done last year? 7 Thai Rangers were killed in gun battles with loggers." Galaga! They lie on my captain. "More cutting." His men spend half of every month patrolling remote jungle trails applied by the loggers. Peasants in here, a lot of thickets, vines, but these guys just slide through like snakes. It's a little tricky for a big corner.

One of the toughest parts about scrambling up these mountainsides is that everything you want to grab to pull yourself up with looks pretty much like this. Looks like you found a smuggler's camp right here. Is that cigarette packs, water bottles, parks, everything's just discarded. Up ahead, More Cod recognizes a letter "K" carved into a tree. The marking belongs to a logger. You can chase him for months. The loggers have grown so brazen that nowadays they taunt the Rangers on patrol. But the Rangers keep hunting them, despite a stunning lack of resources.

"Oh good, he can go to CP admit him cause now God I would put young cow level as Omega noise." Lukas whimpering going, "Me go maybe Impor happening soon Allah to Cornell oh keep it by a single egg and buttermilk inaho Cornetto packet pellicle my bacon."

"Seems like there's a lot of obstacles and risk involved. What keeps you going?"

"We got a blah blah good bit diamond to most appear now you lose you now have I might buy you one minute on what thinking."

On the third day of our patrol, K the logger we've been chasing decides to play with us. "You just can't plan." The freshly cut K looks like it's the same guy who's been taunting the ranchers here, and judging by the color of the cut, it looks like it wasn't made long ago. There are fresh shards here on the ground, so we're going to proceed forward and see what we're fine. The Rangers try to catch up, but the loggers attacked palm fronds to slow them down. Once again, K and his accomplice slip away.

The patrol is over, and the Rangers are frustrated to walk out of GN. But back at headquarters, they catch a break: the poacher has been caught by another ranger unit during a raid on a jungle camp.

"So how long have you been logging? How much one bag up? Oh, mommy! I'm what might one find? All of the men traveling with your tire, were there any Cambodians in your group?"

Wonderful, just a few miles away across the border in Cambodia, a veteran smuggler agreed to speak with us.

"I motive a young my general tandin crowd movement," a crime Allen tells us. "Our murder the uncrowned Amanda Taylor. Have Thai Rangers or police ever come after you? Have you been shot at?"

"Okay claw pan jab that mine man! Several years ago, the smugglers stepped on the land mine left over by the Khmer Rouge, but that hasn't stopped him."

"What can that be never done?"

"We have eluded minute and known it. Melinda to a Delana could have wasted a aquatic are quite you can learn junkie guilty like you thought Souter. Going on over the last two or three years, it's just grown out of control. They're going in with AK-47, M16s, hand grenades, detonators, all sorts of war weapons that they can turn against the Rangers."

Tim Redman works for Free Later, the U.S. government-funded outfit that's training the Rangers to combat rows with poachers.

"As this resource is becoming finite, and it's becoming harder to find, the risks that the loggers are willing to take is increasing. How does the timber move from Thailand to Cambodia, and onward to China?"

"When they come out to the forest, oh, I'll have some middlemen waiting there with trucks or large vehicles to put the timber in, and they're actually making false panels underneath the floor of these trucks, under the beds of the pickup trucks, and they're hiding it underneath. And it all comes back to one person. That I understand, his name is Trey Pierre, and he's got the license to handle all of the timber from Cambodia. So pretty much all the roads come back to this one person."

This remote corner of Cambodia is where smugglers work inside Thailand, bring their stolen timber, and where we meet up with Mei ATAR, one of the best investigative journalists working in the country. With him is H Lane, an independent investigator who tracks illicit rosewood.

"I pretend to be the lighter blocking book, huh? And sometimes I cook for them. I sleep inside a jungle dinner to get information and to get them in evidence."

Cambodia is one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. "No one can do anything again keep others water because uh, I just say that the timber is belonging to get a visa lighter. You can say the king of the roads, working on the timber in Cambodia."

Tree Piaf was once an advisor to Prime Minister Hun Sen; he maintains close ties with the first family. Critics say that official protection is allowed to cut timber in Cambodia on an immense scale. It has also emboldened time to trade rosewood poached from Thailand. A recent investigation found that it allegedly made more than term 220 million dollars connecting illegally logged rosewood over a three-year period.

We headed to Phnom Penh, the capital, to confront Tree P up in the Cambodian government. Cambodian forestry officials refused our request for an interview, but after several days of waiting, representatives from tribute companies agreed to talk with us at a timber museum.

"Tarah tells us there's also a warehouse on that property where Siamese rosewood is stored."

"Atari, you've been trying to get in for more than five years."

"Mike, this is the first time, yeah. All people that I know, people have been arrested for coming around here."

"Joshua, even though me sometimes as a rider get at the museum entrance, we are met by Prakruti, a company spokesperson. The massive columns in the main hall are made of rosewood, which he insists was legally sourced. All this would have license from government, so every piece, not only big, a small piece, it's all I had licensed from the government."

"I know some NGOs are saying that the government has bent the law to give your group access to this timber, which is a living we have a lot of bad idea from outside that's holding that our company, especially on the 3 p.m. that cut down the tree for only the business but truly it's not that maybe all of the excuse is not true for our company."

After a tour of the museum, we asked to see the company warehouse. "What kind of wood is all of this here?"

"This wood is all in Arabic. Yes, yeah, we modified that we cut it down like this a little bit, please. This is ordinary wood. Yes, but booty is lying. Most of the stacked planks and logs are in fact Rozsival."

When I press him on the origin of the wood, he gets nervous and offers to show us proof it was legally cut in Cambodia. "None of this is coming from National Park or protector."

"Yes sure, all of this is half our legal document. I haven't up to men if you want to see over solely the documents."

We look at confirm the planks of rosewood as we suspected. Predictably, they all bear official stamps from a forestry department attesting to their legality.

"Tree Pia plans to open his timber museum sometime next year, that we were told without the slightest hint of irony that the project could be delayed by a shortage of rosewood trucks. In the meantime, foreign demand for rosewood furniture is as high as level 4. Thailand's Rangers, this ensures the battle against illegal logging in the jungle won't be over anytime soon."

Chinese appetites are driving this trade, but we know that some of this timber ends up in the West, including in the United States.

"What do consumers need to know?"

"Probably what most consumers don't understand in America when they're sitting there drinking their cup of coffee off their nice rosewood table is that that's probably coming from an illegal source. People have risked their lives for that timber, and I think there needs to be some due diligence by the consumers: where did my table come from?"