The great majority of Europe’s forests are managed sustainably; to generate a sustainable healthy yield, while maintaining biological diversity and replacing harvested stocks.

In temperate / boreal plantations and semi-natural forests, trees are normally cut in contiguous blocks - 'clearcut' - leaving a large area of denuded land which is then often replanted. In most European countries replanting is obligatory and enforced. For most plantation companies, replanting is a commercial imperative. In diverse natural tropical forests, companies generally log only 10-15 species that are of medium or high commercial value and ignore hundreds of other species (the Amazon forest has approximately 2,500 woody species in the forest).

Logging is therefore 'selective' - and the extent to which the remaining forest is able to recover depends on the extent to which operators reduce impact during logging (and leave the forest undisturbed after logging). Where commercial logging is done well this variation may leave anything between 50-70% of the large trees untouched and 90-95% of the soils unaffected. While logging does increase the likelihood of fire damage, it is what happens outside the forest sector that is critical to the long term fate of the forest (e.g. settlement, ranching, conversion to cash cropping etc.)

Poor quality forest operations may degrade the quality of the forest resource but rarely do they remove it altogether (it is not in their interests so to do - although some operators do put short term gains above long term sustainability). What drives deforestation is the fact that forest production systems cannot generate as much profit as land use alternatives (such as oil palm, soybean, ranching etc.) Market forces replace inefficient production systems with systems that produce more profit - a simple competitive model of survival of the fittest. The consumption of wood is the main reason why forest production systems can exist and compete at all - not the cause of their demise.

International trade comprises a small fraction of the total wood production. Almost 50% of wood is used as fuel which is rarely traded over international borders. For the main other product categories only 20-30% of production enters international trade. In part because of the high unit transport costs for wood products, the main trade flows are intra-regional (e.g. within the EU itself or within South East Asia). The extent to which the EU consumer affects forest trends in a country such as Brazil is marginal - almost 86% of Brazil's production is destined for the domestic market. It is domestic consumption that is the most powerful determinant of the competitiveness of forest land use in comparison with land use alternatives in tropical countries.

Wood boycotts to save the forest have almost entirely the opposite effect. As consumers refrain from buying timber, timber prices fall and the value of forest land falls in comparison with land use alternatives. Since producers are no longer able to make a competitive income from forestry, the obvious alternative is to deforest the land and use it for something else. The only other alternative would be to increase production per unit forest area in order to compensate for the reduced price of timber products. For example, between 1980 and 1993 dozens of European and American organisations actively promoted a ban on tropical timber as a means of decreasing tropical deforestation. In Brazil, production increased from 16 to 23 million m3 per year and the participation of Amazon timber in international markets doubled. The other effect of bans in one place is displacement of the problem to another place - see for example the current predation of forests in Russia and south-east Asia to feed the Chinese market following a logging ban in that country.