Resting on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains, Peru’s rainforest is home to some of Latin America’s last remaining concentrations of old-growth mahogany and other rare hardwood trees. Despite real progress in the last few years, illegal logging still threatens this biologically rich habitat, endangering its native cultures and releasing carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. As loggers extract trees and hunt monkeys and birds, they leave behind clearings soon filled by settlers, road builders and farmers.

Years of intense pressure from BioGems Defenders helped spur a crackdown in 2007 on the illegal mahogany trade; U.S. imports of illegal mahogany from Peru declined tenfold in a single year. This campaign became a centerpiece of our larger effort to close the U.S. market to illegally logged timber from anywhere in the world. In 2008, Congress adopted landmark legislation that bans the import and sale of illegal wood into the United States. We are now escalating pressure on U.S. and Peruvian officials to quash the illegal wood trade, as we fight to gain international protections for tropical forests in the emerging international climate negotiations.