Good news: Police have seized THB5 million worth of illegally harvested rosewood. Bad news: The rosewood was already harvested and there’s not really anything anybody can do about that.
Police made the bust earlier today, when they stopped a farm tractor traveling along a road in Nakhon Ratchasima’s Khon Buri district. Smugglers had sealed four logs of Siamese rosewood – or payoong – under a pile of cassava in the truck’s bed.
The truck’s driver, Pattana Gotepakwaen, claimed that a man paid him THB3,000 a load to transport the timber between Thap Lan National Park and a cassava factory, from which it was distributed to other clients.
Siamese rosewood, which can take decades to reach maturity, has been severely depleted over the past decade. It was recently awarded protection at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Fauna and Flora (CITES) conference, taking place presently in Bangkok.
The Bangkok Post reports that police, acting on information from an informant, also discovered several rosewood planks at a water storage basin in Khon Buri.
