Around the world with Mitsubishi
Brazil: Extensive logging of Peruvian-Colombian border for plywood and hardwood panelling (i.e. mahogany). Also involved in paper mills producing cardboard boxes and other containers.
Bolivia: Hoxan Wood Industries has been a Mitsubishi joint venture since 1975, and is perhaps the largest logging operation in Bolivia.
Chile: Astillas Exportaciones is a wholly owned Mitsubishi subsidiary, chipping primary forest for export to Japan. It has a 70% stake in Forestalas Colarra, a timber processing plant, and interests in eucalypt plantations.
Indonesia: Mitsubishi is the number one exporter of plywood from Indonesia to Japan, with investments in the Barito-Pacific Group in the Moluccas.
Malaysia: Since 1984 Mitsubishi has had a 60% stake in Daiya Malaysia, which logs, transports and sells timber in Sarawak, where it has a 15-year 90,000-hectare logging concession in the Bintulu district. Meiwa Trading, a significant timber trader in Sarawak and Sabah, is 66.8% Mitsubishi owned and has investments in two plywood mills.
Philippines: In Mindanao Mitsubishi owns 25.5% of Agusan Wood Industries, which has been manufacturing plywood since 1956. Through a front company, United Timber, Mitsubishi is not only destroying rainforests, but has also defrauded landowners and the PNG government of $3.25 million over a two-year period through transfer pricing, according to an article by George Marshall in World Rainforest Report No. 24).
Alberta, Canada: With three Japanese partners, Mitsubishi is building one of the world's largest pulp and paper mills in northern Alberta, where it intends to fell half of a 70,000 sq km area of virgin forest by 2012; this will pollute one of Canada's largest river systems.
British Columbia, Canada: Crestbrook
Industries is a 100% Mitsubishi-owned pulp and paper firm, Mayo Forest Products is a 40% Mitsubishi-owned firm, and Mitsubishi has a 45% stake in Canadian Chopstick Manufacturing Co., which produces 9 million disposable wooden chopsticks a day at Fort Nelson.
Siberia: Although stalled by political and economic uncertainty, Mitsubishi and nine other Japanese firms are poised to embark on a $1.4 billion project to exploit the vast untouched Siberian forests. Currently Mitsubishi accounts for 10% of Japan's timber from the former Soviet Union, and with Hyundai is importing 5000 cubic metres of silver fir from logging operations endangering the last 200 Siberian tigers in the wild.
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