logging in Honduras ©Vanessa Kurtz/ Progressio

You're having a dinner party. You've bought a free-range chicken. The vegetables are all organic and locally grown. You've made a delicious desert from Fair Trade goods. It's all going well. But just how ethical is the dinner table you are sitting at, writes Hazel Southam.

At the moment, it's very hard to tell whether your table is made from legal or illegal wood.

You can look out for the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) logo. But, that only accounts for a small part of the market. The shop where you bought your table might not use that marque. So how do you know if the tree that your table was made from was illegally logged? Why does it matter and what can you do about it?

The simple answer is that right now you'd be hard pushed to tell an illegally logged piece of wood from a legally logged one.  Illegal logging has an effect on people you've never met, on the environment and ultimately on us. But how?

Much of the illegal logging happens in the Amazon rainforest, though of course it happens elsewhere too.  The rainforest is huge. It covers 40 per cent of South America. And it's abundant, teeming with life: 1,000 different types of tree, more than 400 sorts of mammals, over 1,200 different birds as well as 30 million people including 220 indigenous tribes.

It may be huge, but the rainforest is finite. Selling logs provides people with an income. And since 1970, in Brazil alone, some 700,000 sq km of forest have been felled. That's almost three times the size of the UK.

What's worse, is that according to Greenpeace, between 60-80 per cent of all logging in the Brazilian Amazon is illegal.

What about people? The consequences of illegal logging may lead to a life of poverty, according to Lizzette Robleto Gonzalez, Progressio Advocacy Co-ordinator.
 
'Unsustainable logging causes water supplies to dry up,' she says. 'So eventually people are forced off the land. They often end up in city slums without work and live a life of poverty simply because the land where they lived was illegally logged and is no longer productive.'

Illegal logging threatens the future of the planet. The rainforest soaks up the carbon that we produce. But once the trees are cut down, that stops and that affects climate change.

But, Lizzette says, we can make a change through our shopping.

First we can lobby Hilary Benn MP to back a new Bill banning illegally logged wood being imported into the UK.

We can demand legally-sourced wood and paper from our shops. Lizzette says, 'We made Fair Trade work because we wanted better conditions for farmers.

'We bought free-range chickens because we wanted better conditions for them.

'If we can do that, we can ensure that illegally-logged wood and paper never gets into our shops.

'It's not just for us; it's for the benefit of the rest of the world as well.'

Take action now to end illegal logging