The establishment of various policies on ‘sustainable’ and ‘legal’ timber production, importation and procurement around the world today has not in reality, resulted in meaningful changes on the ground. At the core of it, the international tropical timber trade has remained more or less the same in structure and content as it was some twenty years ago.  Such policy choices, even those that utilise timber certification schemes, can only function as rudimentary technical responses that are ill-equipped to address deeply flawed structural conditions, built by poor forestry governance and the irrationality of an unsustainable production and consumption system.