Indonesia is the world's largest producer of logs from tropical rainforest. The logs are primarily used in the plywood industry which grew from virtually nothing in 1979 to become, within a decade, first, the greatest producer of tropical plywood, then the greatest exporter of all plywood, and finally, large enough to dominate all wood-panel exports. At the same time,the forests are to be sustainable by the year 2000 and so is subject to intense conservationist attention. This study takes a meticulous look at the data available and examines the value-added and economic rent methodologies used in the existing literature, and concludes that the data are highly inaccurate and the analyses made earlier are unrealistically simplistic.