'Burma teak' for US yachts: US firms fund Myanmar junta

Craftily skirting US imposed sanctions, the famed but fast depleting ‘Burma Teak’ is finding its way into the US markets in a shadowy business transaction where the Myanmar military junta—that is brutally repressing the pro-democracy movement—has a key stake, writes Sanjib Kr Baruah.

New Delhi: US companies are enriching the Myanmar military junta, also called the ‘Tatmadaw’, by illegally importing the famed Burmese teak, ‘Justice for Myanmar’, a group of covert pro-democracy activists campaigning for justice and accountability for the people of Myanmar, said on Tuesday.

Saying that the US sanctions are failing to prevent timber trade with Myanmar, the group—currently banned by Naypyidaw, said: “Continuing trade in timber from Myanmar supports the illegal military junta that is committing atrocity crimes with total impunity, including the indiscriminate murder of children… We call on the US government to ban all Myanmar timber imports to prevent further revenue from reaching the illegal military junta.”

In just 10 months from the coup of February 1 to November 30, 2021, the US companies have imported nearly 1,600 tonnes of the precious teak from Myanmar in 82 different shipments that comprised teak board and scantling.

The US yacht business has a near insatiable demand. In 2019, a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) stated that “traders continue to find ways to get Myanmar teak to multi-millionaire owners of yachts whose manufacturers display an almost ideological obsession with Myanmar teak.”

After the February 1 coup, in order to block the trade that may benefit the junta, the US Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed targeted sanctions on the state-owned Myanma Timber Enterprises (MTE), the single company that manages the sale of timber in Myanmar by auctioning logs to private companies for export. The Tatmadaw takes out a huge percentage from the timber export revenue of MTE.

But in the documentation for the US imports, the US companies skirt the sanctions by trading via intermediaries keeping the link to MTE indirect and allowing potentially illegal imports to pass the radar of the US authorities.

General Min Aung Hlaing-led ‘Tatmadaw’ seized power in a pre-dawn coup on February 1, 2021, effectively ending a decade-year-old experiment with democracy.

Since then in an ongoing brutal crackdown by the ‘Tatmadaw’, about 1,400 people have been killed while more than 10,000 are in jail even as a civil war-like situation prevails in the country with a number of ethnic armed organisations declaring war against the junta.

Of immense cultural value to people in Myanmar, the ‘Burma teak’ grows naturally in the Sagaing, Kachin and Shan states of Myanmar and is understood to be the best and only true teak on earth but fast depleting due to excess felling.

Myanmar’s forests are one of the world’s most important biodiversity areas. According to the EIA, “in the 1990s, the country lost 4.3 million hectares of forest… The country reported 546,000 hectares of forest loss between 2010-15, the third-highest rate worldwide. Combined, since 1990 Myanmar has lost about 20 per cent of its forests, reducing forest cover to around 290,000 sq km, or 45 per cent of its landmass.”