Several sources have been particularly useful in the production of this report, notably publications by the Forest Department in Rangoon; the BurmaNet News Service;* the Far East Economic Review; Burma Debate, published by the Open Society Institute; books and articles by Bangkok-based journalist Bertil Lintner; and Foreign Economic Trends 1996; by the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon.** Principal sources are listed at the end of this report in the References section.

A draft copy of the report was sent to the Forest Department for review, and in October 1997, Jake Brunner traveled to Rangoon to discuss the draft. None of the major findings of the report was challenged. Department staff were prepared to discuss general issues regarding protected areas management and community forestry but refused to discuss logging in the border areas.

The authors thank Dave Skole, Bill Salas, Mike Routhier, and Peg Shea, from the University of New Hampshire, for their analysis of the satellite data of Kachin State; Steven Johnson, from the International Tropical Timber Organization in Yokohama, Japan, for providing the latest figures on the regional timber trade; Kachin-American Friends, Inc. (USA), for their analysis of environmental and political conditions in Kachin State; Carter Brandon, from the World Bank; and Aiontay, who, like many others, provided valuable information but did not wish to be identified.

Three nongovernmental organizations, the Institute for Asian Democracy; EarthRights International (ERI), a human rights and environmental law group based in Bangkok; and the Southeast Asian Information Network (SAIN), a human rights group based in Chiang Mai played an important role in the preparation of the report. In particular, we thank Tyler Giannini and Steve Chojnacki of ERI and Faith Doherty of SAIN for their contributions.

We also thank our colleagues at the World Resources Institute -- Walt Reid, Bob Repetto, Nigel Sizer, Nels Johnson, Dirk Bryant, Dan Tunstall, Blake Ratner, Mairi Dupar, Carmen Revenga, Bob Livernash, and Peter Zollinger for reviewing early drafts of this report. Special thanks are extended to Frances Seymour, who made a major contribution to the Conclusion and Recommendations section, and to Daniel Nielsen, who was responsible for map preparation and statistical analysis of the satellite data.

Finally, we thank the Danish Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Avina Foundation for their generous financial support.

* To subscribe to BurmaNet, send the command "subscribe burmanet-1" to "majordomo@igc.apc.org". ** Unlike econoimc assessments by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund published in 1995, Foreign Economic Trends corrects for the systematic distortions introduced by the dual exchange rate and other errors and omissions that appear in official statistics.