Along with WWF, Greenpeace recently joined a ‘love-in’ with African rainforest logger, Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB), to celebrate the arrival into Switzerland of the first shipment of CIB’s FSC-certified timber.
Author: FSC-Watch
Guyana’s certified ‘Plunder without Profit’
A new report from researcher Janette Bulkan has cast an interesting light on the Guyanese logging industry, including FSC-certified company Barama.
The report seems to confirm what many Guyanese have long known: that the logging industry is not much good for anybody other than the logging companies themselves. According to the new research, as reported in the Starkbroek News, even the FSC-certified Barama brings little or no value to this desperately poor country. Bulkan has found that, whilst Barama’s operations occupy more than a quarter of the country’s entire production forest, it only, for example, employs 300 Guyanese, or 2% of the forestry workforce. The company does not even pay any export taxes.
The joke that is FSC’s ‘Controlled Wood Standard’: the laundry is open for business
One of the more controversial of FSC’s policies has been the ‘Mixed Sources’ policy, which allows manufactured products such as plywood, paper and furniture to be labelled as ‘FSC’ even though the amount of wood fibre from FSC-certified sources is actually as little as 10% of the total wood material in the product.
What is the FSC certifying?
One of the underlying reasons for the existence of this site is that it is difficult, or impossible, even for the FSC members, to pick their way through the relentless ‘public relations’ output from the Secretariat, and to know what is really going on within the organisation. For example, whilst we hear repeatedly about the expanding area of the Earth’s surface under FSC certification, we never seem to hear about the complaints that have been filed about any of these certificates. We never seem to hear that, for example, almost the entire Indonesian NGO community has, for several years, been calling for a cessation of the issuing of any new FSC certificates in their country (and which has been completely ignored by a number of certifiers and by the FSC itself).
A Million Acres of Clearcuts and Pesticide Use “Certified” in Canada and Maine
This article was submitted by Mary Pjerrou, Greenwood Earth Alliance, pirohuck@gmail.com:
‘Abstention Protest’ within FSC: Some Members refuse to vote for Board candidates
A growing number of FSC members feel increasingly uncomfortable with the organisation’s poor performance, indicated by numerous unacceptable certifications and lack of timely and effective action in solving problems. Some FSC members already sense that they are party to a ‘deception of consumers’ and have lost trust in the organisation that they have long supported as members. What can you do as member of an organisation that you believe has gone out of control? Leaving would be one choice. Some still believe in the original aims of the FSC, and they don’t want to leave the organisation. For some, the choice is to perform an ‘Abstention’ Protest: abstaining from voting in formal decisions, such as for the recent Board elections. But this is not a ‘silent protest’: it is important to let the FSC know why you are abstaining from voting.
Selling South Africa’s Forests down the Elands River
The certified ‘green desert’ in the Emerald Isle
This posting has been provided by ‘Irish Environmental and Social Stakeholders’:
Illegal logging in Papua New Guinea: who do we believe? Greenpeace, SGS, or the World Bank?
In August 2006, the World Bank reported that the level of illegal logging in Papua New Guinea could be as much as be 70 percent.
A mere two months later, the FSC accredited certifier SGS maintains that all log exports from PNG are fully legal – and have been for the last 12 years. The article below is from the PNG newspaper The National, which happens to be owned by Rimbunan Hijau, one of PNGs largest loggers.
FSC going off-track in Canada?
From a correspondent in Canada:
FSC-Watch 