FSC-Watch has received the following announcement from the Chair of the FSC Board.
Author: FSC-Watch
SmartWood and Tembec: into the ‘black hole’ of disinformation
FSC-Watch earlier reported on the certification of more areas of Tembec’s vast logging operations in Canada, making it the largest of all FSC certified companies and no doubt earning it’s certifier, SmartWood, substantial fees. David Nickarz, a forest activist in Winnipeg, has been challenging Rainforest Alliance over this certificate. Other forest activists that have questioned SmartWood (there are many of them) will understand what David means by the ‘black hole’ of disinformation that he refers to in the blog article below, which describes his experiences in ‘complaining’ to SmartWood.
FSC Ireland lurches into new crisis as key NGOs withdraw support
FSC-Watch has reported numerous times on the shambles that is the FSC’s Irish Forest Certification Initiative (IFCI), and the associated certificate issued to the state forestry company, Coillte. After more than six years of discussion, consuming copious amounts of funding and stakeholders’ effort, IFCI has still failed to come up with a credible national standard.
British Columbia: “FSC certification is a fraudulent scam”
This comes from Earthtreenews, 27 September 2007:
OECD: timber certification sets bad example for biofuels. FSC also under attack from Australia, Finland, Canada, US?
A new report for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has cast serious doubts about the prospects for certification of biofuels, pointing to the failures of timber certification. The report, entitled ‘Biofuels: Is the Cure Worse than the Disease’ (available for download below), was presented to the OECD’s Round Table on Sustainable Development in Paris in September. It warns that timber certification has failed after many years to come up with credible Chain of Custody systems. The report also point out that certification doesn’t necessarily help to address the underlying problems of either non-sustainable timber or biofuel production because the problem simply gets displaced elsewhere.
Swaziland: fires in certified plantations spark national emergency
The government of Swaziland declared a national emergency earlier this month after fierce fires swept northern parts of the country, killing dozens of people and livestock and destroying hundreds of homes. The fires started in the FSC-certified plantations run by the Mondi company in the Piggs Peaks region, and also affected part of an FSC-certified plantation owned by another South African pulp and paper conglomerate, Sappi.
SmartWood misled US local authority over FSC timber
In the New Jersey town of Ocean City, controversy has been raging about the City Council’s planned use of more than a hundred thousand board feet of FSC-certified rainforest timber. The City Council is planning to use the Amazonian wood ipe (pronounced ‘ee-pay’) for a major renewal of its sea-front boardwalks. Many local people – supported by the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club – are opposed to the use of rainforest timber, and have been asking the City Council to use more environmentally acceptable alternatives. The City’s own Environmental Commission unanimously opposed the use of timber from the Amazon.
WWF responds to Peru scandal
Following queries from FSC-Watch, WWF International has asked us to ‘correct’ the article weposted a few days ago concerning the scandalous certification of Forestal Venao, Peru. In fact, WWF’s helpful clarification of its role does not require us to ‘correct’ the article, but we are anyway happy to include the WWF response below in full.
Norwegian government: ‘FSC not good enough for procurement policy’
The Norwegian government has decided that it it cannot rely on any certification system, not even the FSC, to help implement it’s newly announced ‘ethical procurement’ policy. The Norwegian authorities instead decided to ban all use of tropical timber in public buildings, stating that “The government wants to stop all trade with unsustainably or illegally logged tropical forest products. Today there is no international or national certification that can guarantee in a reliable manner that imported wood is legally and sustainably logged”.
Certification of Forestal Venao, Peru: another FSC credibility disaster, courtesy of SmartWood and WWF
Earlier this year, we reported that Rainforest Alliance SmartWood was in the process of consulting about whether it should start a new ‘Legality Verification’ scheme for timber. Ouropinion was that the Rainforest Alliance’s previous track-record of detecting illegality had been so dismal that there is no reason to believe that they are capable of identifying even gross breaches of the law. Now we have received information of yet another case where SmartWood appears to have ‘turned a blind eye’ to serious illegalities in one of the logging companies it has certified under the FSC scheme.
FSC-Watch 