The Soil Association’s FSC-accredited certifier WoodMark has just announced a ‘stakeholder consultation’ for the potential certification of two management units of the huge Indonesian plantation company, Perhutani.
Certification in the Congo: a cause for celebration or confusion?
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.
Irish Environmental and Social Groups Unite to Demand Removal of Coillte Certificate
The following was submitted by the Irish Environmental and Social Stakeholders’ Alliance:
Reforming the FSC by Competitive Tendering
One the major structural problems that seems to underlie much of what is going wrong in the FSC is that contracts for certification assessments are arranged directly between logging companies and the FSC’s accredited certifiers. Because of this – and especially because the award of a certificate will ensure future profits for the certifiers from monitoring and re-assessments – certifiers have a strong financial incentive to award certificates even when the logging company does not comply with the FSC’s Principles and Criteria.
South African NGOs renew call for suspension of plantation certificates: “massive cost to the environment”
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.
Saved or deleted? FSC certified forest destruction visible from space
One of the problems with the FSC is that the public is almost always reliant on the FSC certifiers’ own reports to understand what is going on in any certfied area of forest – and, as we know, the certifiers have a vested economic interest in telling us the best and maybe, well, glossing over the worst. But in the interests of greater transparency, FSC-Watch can now bring you, thanks to GoogleEarth, a satellite’s view of some of the operations of FSC’s biggest certified company, Tembec, in Quebec, Canada (see below).
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).
FSC vs PEFC: Holy cows vs the Emperor’s new clothes
One of the reasons I am involved in this website is that I believe that many people are aware of serious problems with FSC, but don’t discuss them publicly because the alternative to FSC is even worse. The alternative, in this case is PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification schemes) and all the other certification schemes (Cerflor, Certflor, the Australian Forestry Standard, the Malaysian Timber Certification Council and so on). One person has suggested that we should set up PEFC-Watch, in order “to be even-handed”.
FSC-Watch 