The EU measure has helped zoom focus back on to the problem of controlling an often illegal trade that increasingly flouts sustainable development -- yet provides a livelihood for 500 million people in developing nations, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

"European (timber) firms have made it clear that if we impose too many constraints, producers turn toward the Chinese market, which is less picky and whose needs are enormous," said Francois Jacobee, a forestry expert in the French environment ministry.

The result was the European Union action plan for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT), adopted in December to discourage illegal logging in vulnerable forests that help fight global warming, desertification and a host of other ills.

It aims to promote good governance to quash the cycle of bribery and corruption that only encourages impoverishment, partly by setting up licensing schemes through partnerships with producer countries, on a voluntary basis, to ensure export certificates are granted only to legally harvested timber.

"The idea is to help (producer) countries realize that illegal logging only represents a loss of revenue for them," said Jacobee, who insisted FLEGT was "more realistic than blocking borders" pushed by many non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

"It's got some virtue," said Jean-Marc Roda, a forestry sector specialist at CIRAD, a French agricultural research center for developing nations.

"But it's a marginal effort compared to world production," he said, noting that EU markets account for only four to five percent of world consumption of logs, sawn-wood and veneer.

Greenpeace was more blunt. FLEGT "contains absolutely no elements stringent enough to ensure any real progress," said Ilonga Itoua, a Paris-based expert on African forests for the environmental watchdog.

Asia is now the world hub for tropical timber.

"The Asian market is the world's biggest since it represents three billion people, with an insatiable demand thanks to a growing middle class and dogged urban development in India, China, Japan and Southeast Asia," said Roda.

Asia accounts for 31 percent of the world's annual consumption of wood, but imports a whopping 70 percent of the annual tropical wood harvest, then re-exports part of this in finished products.

Non-governmental organizations have long denounced human rights abuses, the displacement of native populations and other violations that can accompany rampant logging in tropical forests.

In Liberia, the country's forests were plundered for timber to help finance its brutal 14-year civil war. But it remained the second supplier to France, behind Gabon, until the United Nations slammed an embargo on the west African state in 2003.

A European diplomatic source said that "our aim is to help them improve structures already in place", pointing to Cameroon which has made strides in controlling commercial logging of one of the world's largest rainforests.

But Roda insisted that Europe's "virtuous" efforts had been outpaced by an aggressive Asian trade now on the offensive in areas where European competitors once held the monopoly.

"The European firms are more and more often bought out by Asian groups, especially Malaysian, Philippine, Singaporean, Indian or Chinese," said Roda. In the last few years, Asian firms have bought out four million hectares (9.8 million acres) of forests in central Africa and six million in South America's Amazon region, he said.

"Firms, even foreign firms, who work for the European market are in trouble," the CIRAD expert said. "Not only is their volume of orders down, but the Europeans want only top quality."

"A sawmill in Cameroon uses 25 to 35 percent of its raw material, the rest is burned or thrown out. But Asia buys everything available, even wood that won't sell elsewhere," Roda said.

Roda said a trend towards eco-certificates -- labels supposedly attesting to sustainable development -- "is a total failure in saving tropical forests because the illegal market is not the western market: most illegal wood is consumed locally or goes to Asia."

"Everything that comes through Asia is questionable," added an expert in Asian timber markets who asked not to be named because of his investigations into the trade.

"For by-products, much of the wood used is illegal, even if it carries a certification. With laser printers today, you can forge any certificate you want," according to the source, who said China and Vietnam were the worst offenders.

UNCTAD warns that tropical forests are disappearing at the rate of 15 million hectares (37 million acres) per year across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

This belies encouraging official UN figures showing the legal trade in tropical timber down from 13 billion dollars in 1990 to eight billion today.

The slack, clearly, is taken up by illegal logging that the Worldwide Fund for Nature says brings in an estimated 10 billion euros per year.

The true picture is unclear.

The Environmental Investigation Agency, a British-based group that probes environmental crime, says timber trafficking in eastern and southeast Asia represents 2.5 billion dollars a year.

But officials in Indonesia, said to have the world's worst deforestation rate, say illegal logging costs that country alone three billion dollars every year.

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