Bad Notes in China’s Guitar Trade
Western musicians delight in the world’s best and most exotic guitars, but it is claimed Chinese-made instruments are fuelling an illegal trade in rare timber.
Environment watchdog Global Witness says rare and sought after timbers, such as ebony and rosewood, are being cut down in the forests of Madagascar and exported to Chinese guitar factories.
Some companies, however, are promoting their use of sustainable timbers for guitars.
Maton is Australia�s best known guitar maker, and director Anthony Knowles told Radio Australia’s Asia Pacific program they pioneered the use of alternative Australian wood when making their first acoustic guitar in 1946.
Point
He said his company makes a point of using Australian alternatives to classic guitar timbers for their handmade acoustic and electric guitars.
“In recent times we’ve used bunya pine as an alternative to spruce tops and we use Queensland maple as an alternative to mahogany. All our guitar necks are Queensland maple,” he said.
But Mr Knowles says Maton is increasingly feeling the pressure in the market as they compete with Asian factories, where the ethical sourcing of timbers is not a priority.
“The real problem is cheap manufactured guitars in China, They are making hundreds of thousands of guitars and they flood foreign markets with them and sell them cheaply.”
A report this week by Global Witness says China’s trade in furniture and to a lesser extent musical instruments is fuelling illegal logging that threatens forests in the African nation of Madagascar.
Huge amounts of wood are used to satisfy the Chinese furniture market, with enormous timber beds selling for as much as $US1 million.
But Reiner Tegtmeyer, an international forestry expert with Global Witness, says musical instruments are also part of the problem.
Among so-called tone woods, “at the moment there is a high demand for ebony for musical instrument,” he notes.
International guitar makers received a wake-up call in November last year, when US authorities raided the Nashville factory of Gibson guitars on suspicion they were using illegally sourced timber from Madagascar.
Embarrassingly, the raid prompted Gibson’s chairman to take leave of absence from the board of Rainforest Alliance, which certifies environmentally friendly products.
Laws
The US has strict legislation, under the Lacey Act, which requires detailed listings of the type and amount of timber in each instrument.
But Mr Tegtmeyer says consumers also have a part to play.
By “buying a guitar that has been produced using ebony from Madagascar, consumers are indirectly contributing to the destruction of the biodiversity of the unique forests of Madagascar,” he told the program.
Maton isn’t the only company to use sustainable timber in its guitars. And Mr Knowles acknowledges they do require more exotic species, such as the honey-coloured satinbox but when they do, they take pains to know it has been acquired responsibly, using sustainable harvesting.
He says Australia should consider toughening its legislation controlling the import of musical instruments to stop the flow of illegal timber and promote locally grown products.
Source: ABC Radio Australia
Its actually the US trying to control everything, everywhere. Most of the “problems” with exotic wood and deforestation is nonsense fabricated by environmentalist pseudo-scientists. Try actually talking to the local official forest services in south American countries and you will see the US is forcing their nonsense on them and costing these countries jobs and causing more harm to the environment. If the US can deceptively make something “rare”, it costs more. Much like diamonds….
I own several China-made acoustics and had no knowledge that some of the materials for guitar building may have been illegally obtained. While I support all nations efforts to control this problem, I take issue with being labeled as a contributor, indirectly or directly. I get a little tired of this “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” mentality getting thrown around about things like this. If there were a way of accounting for this when buying a guitar made in China, I would certainly avoid any instruments using contraband or controlled-use tonewoods. Just because I may unknowingly own one of these guitars using illegally harvested woods, do not infer that I am in any way responsible for supporting such activities.