Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim Delivers Remarks at One-Year Anniversary of the Launch of the TIMBER Working Group

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

Thank you, Seth. I welcome you all to the Department of Justice for the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Timber Interdiction Membership Board and Enforcement Resources Working Group. We originally planned for this to be a small meeting in my conference room, but we needed a much larger space due to your overwhelming support of and interest in the TIMBER Working Group. We are pleased to host you here in the Great Hall. It has seen a lot of history, and we're adding to that history today.

Let me start with some thanks. I want to thank the members of the TIMBER Working Group for their work and for being here to discuss it today, as well as our non-member interagency partners.

I also thank the NGOs who have assembled today. I recognize that the active thought leaders in the NGO community have experience and expertise in a variety of enforcement areas - like wood identification, investigative research and outreach. I know how busy you are and appreciate your sharing time with us today.

And I thank my staff from the Environment and Natural Resources Division for pulling this event together. It takes a lot of work to organize these events and their efforts above and beyond their "day" jobs is truly appreciated.

For a one-year anniversary like we're celebrating today, the traditional gift is paper. The modern gift is a clock. Both are appropriate symbols as we think about the mandate of the TIMBER Working Group and the broader work of our interagency partners and the NGOs who all work to combat timber trafficking and deforestation.

The ubiquity of paper shows how important this work is. None of us can go about our day without touching paper or using some form of wood or wood product. Be it sitting at your kitchen table, building your dream home, mailing a package or signing the registration sheet when you came in - we are constantly interacting with wood or wood products in some form.

And so, as we all are aware, criminals perceive great incentives to engage in timber trafficking, which has been identified as the third most profitable form of transnational organized crime, following only counterfeiting and illegal drug trafficking. These crimes do more than just harm the environment by contributing to climate change and biodiversity loss. These crimes destabilize governments through corruption and loss of lawful tax revenues to take care of the public good. They fund criminal or terrorist organizations who use the monies from these crimes to fund other illicit activities. And they disadvantage law-abiding businesses who invest in compliance but are undercut in the marketplace, and who then have smaller profits, are forced to employ fewer people or are driven out of business entirely. In short, these crimes have real-life global consequences in a multitude of ways that can't be ignored.

The clock symbolizes how we are all competing against time to slow or stop the effects of these crimes. Twenty-one trees were felled per second in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest in 2021, according to MapBiomas. According to WRI, 10 football fields' worth of tropical primary forest were lost every minute in 2023. The World Animal Foundation estimates the world is losing 137 species of plants, animals and insects every day because of deforestation. This is about 50,000 species a year. And Global Witness estimates that an environmental defender was killed at a rate of every other day in 2022.

These are a few examples of the impact of illegal logging on the world's forests and the species that depend on them. While these numbers are only estimates, they are undeniably sobering numbers that are just the beginning of being able to understand the impact of these crimes.

We have, however, witnessed a greater and greater response. Since the United States became the first country to criminalize the transnational trafficking of plants and plant products, including timber, with the 2008 Lacey Act amendments, the global community has taken notice. The United Kingdom, European Union, Australia, Japan and other nations have followed suit by passing similar laws.

We have also seen the global community develop a more nuanced understanding of the drivers of illegal timber trafficking and deforestation, and responding with enhanced legislation or other policy reviews. For example, the agricultural drivers of deforestation are being addressed by recent legislation in the U.K. and E.U. Under President Biden's direction, the United States, too, is evaluating its authorities to address this issue, as outlined in Executive Order 14072, entitled Strengthening the Nation's Forests, Communities, and Local Economies.

This global commitment to combating illegal timber trafficking is encouraging. But the challenge remains great.

At our launch meeting last year, the TIMBER Working Group made a public commitment to each other, our federal partners, the NGO community and the public to bring the resources of these key law enforcement and scientific agencies - and the prosecutorial resources of the Justice Department - to bear in meeting this challenge. We are committed to transforming what some consider a crime of low risk and high reward into a crime of high risk and no reward.

The TIMBER Working Group also publicly committed to our foreign partners to work with them to enhance the global network and collaborate in investigating and prosecuting these transnational crimes.

In keeping with these commitments, the TIMBER Working Group is having this anniversary meeting to provide transparency about its work over the past 12 months. You will hear from group members directly about their activities. In a short time, they have made a great deal of progress on case matters and have laid critical groundwork for interagency collaborations on investigations and prosecutions and domestic and international capacity-building. While they must protect the integrity of active investigations and prosecutions, you will hear about the resources that have been invested, prosecution results and their work with our foreign counterparts.

Of course, so much work by our interagency partners and the NGOs in this room has informed or supported the work of group members. We tremendously value your thoughts on what more the TIMBER Working Group should do and what you yourselves have found successful these past 12 months. We cannot do this important work alone. We are looking forward to hearing from you today and going forward.

Anniversaries are important. While l can't commit to having events of this size every year, I can commit to keeping the lines of communication open and continuing to be as transparent about our work as we can.

For a five-year wedding anniversary, I'll note, the traditional gift is wood. While it may be too much to hope there will no longer be a need for this group at the five-year mark, I look forward to celebrating then the continued progress toward eliminating the profit incentive from these crimes.

I thank you again for attending. I now turn the program over to Kate Konschnik, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division.

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