IN THE Amazon rainforest of Peru, on a dusty, unpaved road through villages of palm-thatch houses, trucks thunder by in an endless procession, scattering the round river rocks brought in to fortify the road.
A cement marker proudly recounts the road’s brief history: built in 2004, this thoroughfare was part of a US-funded incentive programme intended to help local people find economic alternatives to growing coca, the plant from which cocaine is produced.
Four years later, the road is the sucking end of a global vacuum through which timber is whisked from the Peruvian rainforest to China, now the world’s…
