Whilst some might find the thought of harvesting timber from tropical rainforests to be damaging to biodiversity. Much of S.E. Asia's forests are only maintained as forests for the value of the timber they contain. If you lower the demand for tropical hardwood's then there are two immediate impacts:

1. Marginal logging concessions may no longer be viable providing a further economic incentive to convert the forested area to fastwood plantations or to agricultural use such as oil palm.

2. For those logging concessions certified by a body that promotes sustainable management would now have to compete with suppliers of non-hardwood certified timber. This would act as a disincentive to become certified as it would lower the relatively small margins obtained for certified timber.

This product could only achieve 'a global eco-solution to ... rain forest deforestation' if there were sufficient incentives to maintain the tropical forests without the need to harvest. Although the introduction of REDD may provide a potential mechanism for this, in the short term this product could do more harm than good.

This sounds like a forester's argument if I've ever hear of one. Kind of similar to "building a larger number of more efficient saw mills will reduce waste and therefore pressure on forests" line-of-reasoning.

That aside, I don't think we need to worry much about Kebony capturing 100% of the hardwood market overnight. Tropical timber is logged for a variety of uses and reasons beyond what Kebony offers.

L.D., the title of the article and the claims of the company, can only be true if logging was the major threat to tropical rainforests AND the production of a substitute product was sufficient to reduce this demand. However, certainly in Indonesia and much of SE Asia the greatest threat to the forests is the expansion of industrial agriculture. Devaluing tropical timber products may reduce logging but can only act to hasten the rate of conversion resulting in a much greater loss of biodiversity than a reduction in logging.

The certified logging concessions supply, in part, a niche market which even relatively low volumes of Kebony's products could potentially be a big disincentive to become/remain certified.

Whilst I am happy to be corrected the example you give of a forester's fallacious proposition is a straw man argument as it fails to challenge the points I raised. The only winner I see from Kebony's product is the company itself and the non-tropical timber producers.