Shares in timber company Gunns fell sharply in intraday trading today, following reports that the ANZ bank would pull out of funding Gunns' controversial $2 billion pulp mill project in Tasmania. At 12.51pm, Gunns was down 18 cents, or 5.61%, at $3.03, having touched a low for the day of $3.01. "There's a bit of uncertainty over the funding of the mill,'' CMC Markets head of trading James Foulsham said. "But there still hasn't been big volumes going through. "So I don't think it's any wholesale dumping by any of the institutional investors or anything like that.''

Two years after the un Security Council lifted sanctions on timber exports from Liberia, the government has resumed logging saying that it has fulfilled all measures asked by the un. The

An internation al workshop is being organised in the city to help in establishing a network for facilitating the collection, processing and dissemination of statistics pertaining of tropical timber and other forestry parameters. India is a signatory to International Tropical Timber Agreement (ITTA). The workshop will also take up issues like demand and supply, production and consumption data of tropical timber, which are required on an annual basis.

With saw-millers not willing to supply timber at the new commercial rate fixed by the government in January, Trashigang is facing a timber shortage. Saw-millers in the dzongkhag Kuensel spoke to said they had stopped supplying timber as they had been losing money in the business. They said that business had become erratic ever since the government's new timber pricing policy came into effect. Ever since the new rule came into force, not many saw-millers have attended the logging auctions held once a month in Mongar. Most sawmills are out of logs.

It is common knowledge in Bangladesh that our forests have been decimated in recent decades. Less apparent than the loss of forests is the loss of other goods and services that forests provide particularly to the neighbouring poor people whose well being and livelihoods depend on these forests.

Portugal is struggling to contain a new outbreak of nematodes, microscopic worm-like organisms that are killing wild pine trees and threaten to spread abroad despite drastic measures to stop their advance. The government cut a 430 km (265 mile) corridor through Portugal's southern forests last year to contain the Pine Wilt Nematode within a 1 million hectare (2.47 million acres) area, about one ninth of Portugal's forested land.

The NWFP Minister for Environment and Forest, Wajid Ali Khan has said that the provincial government will install solar wood seasoning plants at two major timber markets of the Forest Development Corporation (FDC). The plants to be installed at Chakdara (Swat) and Goharabad (Havelian) would enhance the wood quality that would produce durable furniture.

Greenpeace Warns On Canada's Northern Forests CANADA: April 11, 2008 VANCOUVER - Greenpeace warned on Thursday that Canada's logging practices threaten to turn the country's vast northern forest into a source of global warming, but the forestry industry says it is already taking steps to fight climate change. Logging and other development in the boreal forest release the carbon that the trees have trapped from the atmosphere over decades, potentially producing more greenhouse gases than from burning fossil fuels, the environmental group charged in a new report.