On September 21 a government decree "temporarily" legalised the export of "certain stocks" of precious woods, citing the need to "evacuate trees uprooted by the cyclones" that affected the north east of the island in 2008.

"This decree makes a mockery of efforts to work towards environmental good governance and a transparent system of marketing timber," said the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Conservation International (CI).

A local conservation umbrella group Voahary Gasy has called for the decree to be "voided immediately" in order to halt the organised "destruction of Madagascar's natural resources and biodiversity."

Madagascar, an island the size of France, "has 47 species of rosewood and over 100 ebony species that occur nowhere else, and their exploitation is pushing some to the brink of extinction," a group of international wildlife organisations said in a statement this week,

"Those exploiting the trees are also trapping endangered lemurs for food, and the forests themselves are being degraded as trees are felled, processed and dragged to adjacent rivers or roads for transport to the coast."

Lemurs are endemic to Madagascar and the main threat to their continued existence is the destruction of their habitat.

At the beginning of the year, the previous administration had temporarily authorised the sale of precious woods. This decree was voided by the new transitional authorities, but only after almost all the stocks counted at the time -- several hundred containers -- had already left Madagascar.

If the total quantity set for export in the coming days are still unknown, 13 operators have been authorised to export a total of 25 containers each.

For a former government timber official it is more a case of "legalising" timber felled illegally.

"Biazarrely, every time there's a cyclone, the trees that are affected are always precious wood" despite the fact "they are the hardest and logically the ones that should fall last," he said.

"There have always been stocks piled up everywhere. These operators hide them and then as soon as there's an opportunity they bribe the government and produce their 'stocks'," complained Ndranto Razakamanarina, the head of Voahary Gasy.

Madagascans have long hesitated to speak out on the subject, but given the scale of the illegal traffic Voahary Gasy has decided to speak out.

Razakamanarina, estimates that some 30,000 cubic metres of precious woods, the equivalent of 11,000 hectares of forest, have either been exported or are on the point of being exported since the start of the year.

Officials at the Environment ministry acknowledge having authorised the resumption of exports but say the move has been misinterpreted.

"Some people say it's a type of laundering, but if you look you can see it's a sort of stabilisation," the director general of forests Julien Noel Rakotoarisoa told AFP.

"But it's true that since January there has been quite a lot of illegal logging, with people in the timber trade making the most of the situation," he said.

For him the solution is to ship out or auction off all current stocks and start again from scratch so that timber traders can no longer say that freshly-logged precious woods were in fact part of their "stocks".

"After that we'll apply the existing law," he said.

Rosewood, which is prized for marquetry, is a highly profitable business for traders, with a 20-foot container fetching between 60,000 and 100,000 dollars.

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