Fret The Hardwood

Your Gibson guitar may be a collector's item soon.

Federal agents raided the guitar manufacturer's factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Fish and Wildlife Service believe there may be illegally harvested Madagascar ebony and other woods from protected forests being used, and nobody wants to support the lumber equivalent of blood diamonds! Here's your blockquote:

“The Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.”

Back in 2009, Gibson was raided, resulting in several seized guitars and pallets of wood, and the pedestrian named United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms, which questioned if the company had been buying illegally harvested hardwoods from protected forests - and if they did so knowingly. In this new raid, the government is trying to determine whether some wood sourced from India met every regulatory stipulation.

But rare materials are not only a problem for new instruments. Recent revisions to 1900's Lacey Act that require anyone crossing the U.S. border to declare all manner of flora or fauna entering the country. If your vintage guitar was made with a now-restricted wood, and you better have correct and complete documentation proving the age of the instrument or an overzealous customs agent could start you down the road of fines and prosecution.

I've dealt with the Fish and Wildlife Service for work issues before - a client was sending some feather pom-poms to attach to a shoe, and because they put our company on the handbill, we had to register for an importer's license, even though we were just the third party recipient.  God forbid they send 1 pound of ostrich feather from China to our country without holding the goods in quarantine for an extra 10 days! I think their self-aggrandizing hunt of Gibson is another study in bureaucracy .