The following information has been supplied by the Russian NGO, SPOK.
This is yet another example of an FSC certificate issued by Rainforest Alliance SmartWood having to be challenged by NGOs. The logging company in question, Zapkarelles, has a concession of over 800,000 hectares of old growth forest in Karelia.
Earlier this year, we reported on SmartWood’s certification of Hancock Victoria Plantations, Australia. We have been asked to post this update by Anthony Amis, a local expert. Further images and details are available at Hancock Watch.
During the 1990s, Clayoquot Sound was the site of the largest anti-logging protests in Canada’s history. Today FSC certification is legitimising industrial-scale logging in Clayoquot Sound.
A US timber company is suing a New Jersey city authority over its cancellation of a controversial order of FSC certified lumber for repair of its ocean-front boardwalks. In the latest development in this long-running debacle, which has exposed gaping weaknesses in the FSC’s Chain of Custody system, the Louis Grasmick Lumber company of Baltimore has said that it will sue the Ocean City authorities for $1.2 million.
Braving sub-zero temperatures and wearing gorilla and bird costumes, a group of New York City environmentalists rallied outside the headquarters of Rainforest Alliance last week, demanding an end to the organization’s certification of old-growth industrial logging.
The most recent report of the official Independent Forest Monitor in Nicaragua, the London-based NGO Global Witness, has once again called into question the ability of FSC’s accredited certifiers to detect illegalities in certified forestry operations. The December 2007 report notes that “The Monitor was not able to detect a significantly different level of legal compliance between certified and uncertified forest”.
We have been asked to publish the following article, by Anthony Amis of Friends of the Earth Melbourne, Australia.
It highlights some now very familiar themes: failure of SmartWood to comply with the FSC’s rules by not publishing its Public Summary reports in a timely manner: certification on the basis of ‘hoped-for improvements’ rather than performance, and covering up failures to actually improve by continually re-issuing ‘Corrective Action Requests’; slowness of the ASI in publishing the reports of it’s audits of certifiers where problems are identified…all of which is no doubt good for SmartWood’s business, but bad for the FSC’s credibility.
In December 2007, the FSC announced that it was “dissociating” itself from the giant Sinar Mas-owned Indonesian paper company Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) – see statement below. The news was mostly greeted by the environmental movement, though there is some suspicion that the FSC only took this unusual step because the possible certification of APP had been exposed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. WWF in particular has issued stinging reports of the company’s greewashing of its destruction of forests to feed its pulp mill in Riau province, Sumatra. (For WWF, this was yet another ‘logger love-in’ turned sour, having signed an agreement with APP and its parent company in 2003 to advise on sustainable forest management.)
In a move that will further add to FSC’s woes, the biggest of its accredited ‘certifiers’, Rainforest Alliance SmartWood, has announced plans to launch it’s own ‘logging certification’ scheme, which is closely modelled on the FSC. In a consultation document circulated recently by SmartWood, the organisation claimed that it “remains an unequivocal, global supporter of the FSC system as the most credible forest certification system” but then, before introducing the proposed rival system, goes on to say that “we also believe that the FSC system can be improved”.
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-Watch 