When the United States and Peru signed a free-trade agreement in June 2007, environmental groups in both nations hailed the way it addressed Peru’s illegal-logging problem. That approach, described in an annex, included measures to monitor protected tree species and permit the United States, one of Peru’s top wood purchasers, to deny entry to suspicious cargo. In Peru, green groups typically skeptical of free-trade accords viewed the agreement as a potentially positive response to the country’s rampant deforestation. Today that hope is on hold, the same groups say. In 2012 two U.S.-based nonprofits, the Environmental Investigation Agency and Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), identified dozens of shipments of timber illegally exported to the United States from Peru. They appealed to... [Log in to read more]