Kota Kinabalu: When Sabah was Malaysia’s top timber exporting state over four decades since the 1960s, Japanese trading houses known as “sogo shosha,” like Mitsui, Nissho Iwai, Marubeni, and others like Nicheman Corporation, Mitsubishi, Itochu had their representative or branch offices (now most closed) in the State Capital up to the exit of Japanese involvement in the controversial Mamut Copper Mine output export to Japan.

After 2018, when the Warisan plus government took power and banned log exports, little was known what steps resource-scarce Japan took to make up for the shortfall in the import of tropical logs from Sabah. Timber Association of Sabah president Norman Wong pointed out a report by Kei Sekiguchi and Konatsu Ochi that Japanese log importers have switched over to log supplies from Papua New Guinea.

In their report, Kei Sekiguchi and Konatsu Ochi write that: “In May 2018, the Malaysian state of Sabah, a major supplier of tropical logs, banned exports in the name of protecting forests. Japanese importers then turned to Papua New Guinea, which Japan now relies on for 80 per cent of its tropical log imports.”