Certifier conflict of interest

Slovak environmental NGOs ‘sickened’ by re-certification of Presov Forest District: the FSC’s failings laid bare

Last month, FSC-Watch reported on the ‘race to the bottom’ of FSC standards for certification of the Presov Forest District in Slovakia.

The race has now been run, and the certificate – which was withdrawn only a few weeks ago by Soil Association WoodMark – has now been ‘re-awarded’ by SGS. One representative of the Slovak environmental movement has said that they are ‘sickened’ by this development, and have dismissed the certificate as “nothing but greenwashing”. Forests managed by the Presov Forest District are, they say, amongst the worst managed state forests in Slovakia, and the certificate will help no-one but the businesses involved in the FSC.

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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.

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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.

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Green groups call for urgent reform of the FSC – certifiers ‘eroding credibility’

On 30th October, more than 75 environmental organisations from 25 countries wrote a letter to the Executive Director of FSC, Heiko Liedeker, and the FSC’s International Board, calling for urgent improvements to the FSC system. The groups include WWF International, Greenpeace International, Birdlife Internationl, Friends of the Earth UK, the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense.

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Aracruz, SmartWood, FSC and a conflict of interest

In 2003, Brazil’s Aracruz bought Klabin’s Riocell pulp operations in Rio Grande do Sul. The 400,000 tonnes a year pulp mill came with 40,000 hectares of FSC-certified plantations.

Aracruz is among the most controversial pulp companies in the world. It has an ongoing dispute with indigenous people and quilombolas in Espirito Santo province. The company is currently carrying out a racist campaign aiming to turn the population of Espirito Santo against the indigenous people. The working conditions in its plantations are terrible.

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Slovakia – the ‘race to the bottom’ for FSC’s certification standards

The certification by the Soil Association in 2001 of Presov Forest District (PFD, part of the state forestry service) in Slovakia, has always been controversial.

Local environmental groups, such as WOLF/Friends of the Earth Slovakia have long argued that PFD was in gross non-compliance with the FSC’s Principles and Criteria. They provided detailed, Principle-by-Principle critiques of PFD’s operations, both before and after the certificate was issued, detailing multiple failures to comply with the P&C. These were evidently ignored by the Soil Association, who issued the certificate, and maintained it until 2006.

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