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Trading Companies
For information on each of the following trading companies please click on their respective hyperlinks: Japan's general trading companies ("sogo shosha") supply much of the tropical timber which is imported into Japan and have shaped the nature and sources of that trade. The construction industry, into which a number of these companies are (directly or through membership of corporate groups "keiretsu") vertically integrated, is Japan's biggest end-consumer of tropical timber. The role of the large Japanese trading companies in the destructive logging industries of Southeast Asia has been well documented since the early 1980s when many NGOs were targeting rampant logging in Sarawak. A particularly thorough account of Japan's trading companies and tropical timber logging is "Shadows in the Forest: Japan and the politics of timber in Southeast Asia" by Peter Dauvergne (1997). A key trend over the last decade has been a gradual withdrawal by the leading trading companies from direct investment in timber projects in Southeast Asia, mainly due to adverse publicity, but also due to the growth of Southeast Asia's own wood processing and trading sector. However, the same Japanese trading houses maintain very active "arms-length buying relationship with Southeast Asian logging interests. A number of Japan's trading companies do not supply only Japan with timber - they also supply China (and Hong Kong) with tropical timber (including from Africa). Japan has for many years been much the world's largest importer of tropical timber and, but only up to 2001, also of timber from eastern Russia. As such, Japan has had a direct influence on the evolution of this trade, particularly governance. For information on each of the following trading companies please click on their respective hyperlinks:
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