The purpose behind the founding of the Forest Stewardship Council (hereinafter FSC or the Council) was to create an international system to verify the origin and quality of sustainable forest timber. Critics argue that the system has failed to halt the destruction of tropical forests and has occasionally served as a cover for illegal timber shipments.
In the early days of the Forest Stewardship Council in 1993, it seemed that this Council symbolised a triumph of market-oriented thinking over tiresome government regulatory controls. Participants in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit were unable to agree on government influence in combating the ever-increasing loss of tropical forests. Therefore, environmental organisations, social movements, and industry representatives came together to create a voluntary system for improving forestry operations and certifying sustainable timber.
The Forest Stewardship Council soon set standards that delighted environmental and social activists. These included forest conservation and restoration, the rights of local inhabitants, the economic and social well-being of workers, and other criteria. For the industry, FSC certification promised not only better business conditions but also higher prices for forest materials marked with the FSC label.
A quarter of a century later, original FSC supporters are dissatisfied, believing the initial plan has not succeeded as hoped, with the exception of the plan to raise prices: FSC reports that FSC-labelled tropical timber is sold at auctions for 15-25 percent more. Environmental critics and some academic researchers believe that FSC’s impact on combating tropical deforestation has been little to none. Moreover, the number of recent forestry industry scandals suggests that the FSC label has occasionally served only to “green-mislead” or “greenwash” (an association with money laundering) the transport of illegal timber.
In a 2014 report, FSC member organisation Greenpeace harshly condemned FSC International for its lack of involvement when FSC-certified loggers devastated the Russian taiga, specifically the Northern Dvina forests, more than 700 miles north of Moscow. Greenpeace accused FSC-certified logging companies of harvesting timber in forests in a way that could uncover and damage non-renewable resource extraction sites – coal – and for conducting logging “in areas that are supposed to be protected by law and which should be protected under FSC requirements.”
A Chinese company marketing in the US offered to label illegally obtained timber with the FSC mark, demanding a 10% surcharge in return.
· In 2015, the US company Lumber Liquidators, which deals in flooring manufacturing, admitted to importing illegal timber from the last habitat of the Amur tiger in the Russian Far East. The company’s main oak supplier is the Chinese company Xingjia, which was awarded an FSC “chain of custody” certificate and had permission to trade in FSC-certified timber. Another Chinese company marketing in the US offered to label illegally obtained wood flooring with the FSC mark, demanding a 10% surcharge in return.
· In 2016, investigators in Peru concluded that in two recent shipments, more than 90% of the timber delivered from the Amazon forests to Mexico and the US had been obtained illegally. In a so-called “uncoordinated raid” last October, the US Trade Representative banned the largest exporter from conducting transactions in the US market. The company Inversiones La Oroza still boasts on its website that its operations “meet FSC conditions and criteria,” even though FSC cancelled its certificate in 2017.
In 2015, a covert investigation revealed that the FSC-certified Austrian company Holzindustrie Schweighofer was carrying out illegal logging in Romania, including in national parks and protected areas. Later, an FSC expert group, based on “clear and convincing evidence” of illegal activities, recommended that the Council stop cooperating with this company. Initially, FSC chose to suspend cooperation for a while, but protests from environmentalists soon forced the Council to cease cooperation with this company completely. Despite this, FSC is already working on an action plan for Schweighofer to be able to receive certification again.
Violations in China, Peru, and Romania were uncovered only thanks to covert investigation operations carried out by a Washington-registered non-profit organisation, the Environmental Investigation Agency. “Our goal was not to investigate FSC’s operations,” says David Gehl, Eurasia Programme Coordinator, “FSC simply kept appearing in places where a lot of illegal logging occurs.” It turned out that several logging companies had received FSC certification for economic operations in one forest but used this permission as a cover for broader operations in forests elsewhere, without regard for forest sustainability or the legality of operations.
The Director General of the Bonn-based Forest Stewardship Council, Kim Carstensen, believes that the organisation has acted appropriately in these cases. “I believe that, overall, our verification systems are strong, robust, and are being continuously developed,” he adds. “Nothing is perfect, and of course, there are problems with FSC certificates as well. We have a great many stakeholders who point out these problems and force us to act. We are constantly fixing a great many problems, and I think the system is very cohesive.”
Simon Counsell, Executive Director of the UK Rainforest Foundation and a proposer of the forest certification concept, claims the opposite. His dissatisfaction with FSC led to his investments in the website FSC-Watch.com. It is a site “where you can see many, many examples of unauthorised logging throughout the history of FSC’s existence, in all types of forests and plantations, suggesting that serious problems still exist within the FSC system. One of them is the inability, and perhaps even the unwillingness, of the FSC secretariat to supervise the bodies responsible for issuing certificates on FSC’s behalf.”
Counsell claims that these certification bodies are often not competent with regard to verifying logging operations, regularly discovered problems are not sufficiently assessed, and too little attention is paid to fraud and the dissemination of false information. Such leniency may have arisen because these bodies receive direct payments from the companies being inspected. Certifiers “know they can get away with issuing certificates to companies that are quite openly breaking the law, without receiving any penalty from FSC,” he says. Carstensen replied that FSC acts in accordance with the results of independent financial audits and that the payment system does not differ from how public limited companies pay accounting firms to audit their finances.
According to critics, money issues hinder FSC’s work in other ways too. The organisation’s decision-making structure consists of environmental, social, and economic (or industry) chambers, each of which has an equal vote. Many issues are referred to working groups that can discuss for years until an agreement is reached. The truth, says Counsell, is that environmental and social groups usually cannot coordinate resources and staff working hours in the way that logging companies can, whose financial interest is “at stake.” (Carstensen claims that environmental and social groups exist partly because they can attract media attention to unacceptable behaviour.)
When proposals finally reach the FSC General Assembly, which takes place every three years, each chamber has veto power. This means they can reject any initiative that does not align with their interests. But at the 2017 General Assembly, “the economic chamber voting block’s desire to reject proposals,” as Greenpeace representative Grant Rosoman later wrote, became known as the “red sea,” because the red “no” cards were raised by the industry chamber voters all at once. “This caused great outrage,” said Rosoman, “especially because issues important to the social and environmental chambers were voted ‘against’ without any explanations or arguments, or prior discussion during the inter-chamber proposal development process.” He called it a “turning point” in FSC’s operations.
The economic chamber has gained control over FSC because there is competition with other forest certification bodies managed by this chamber, especially the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). Environmental Investigation Agency representative David Gehl calls PEFC “an industry certification for the industry itself” without social and environmental chambers. Buyers often have difficulty distinguishing Greenpeace’s so-called “fake forest certificate” from the real one. As a result, it is more difficult for FSC to implement strict conditions for logging companies. A threat is posed by the possibility that more lax conditions could turn FSC’s operations into a “fake forest certification” scheme.
Money changes the balance of certification in another very significant way. Although FSC’s original goal was to reduce tropical deforestation, the Council has largely carried out its operations elsewhere. Almost 85% of the currently certified 492 million acres of forest are territories in North America and Europe. “It looks as if someone had ordered an armada to go to the tropical zone and solve the forest management issues there,” says one of the FSC operation monitors, “but it has gone north.”
The change in the direction of operations was not planned. Certification can be expensive because 10% of the forest must be set aside for conservation, and costs must also be anticipated for improving labour usage and forestry operations. Forestry companies in developed countries are often in a better financial situation than their counterparts in the tropical zone when it comes to covering the costs created by the changes. Sometimes, in developed countries, changes have already been introduced previously in accordance with local laws. The result, according to Counsell: FSC “essentially highlights already well-managed forestry, because these countries have a better regulatory regime for the forest sector. The Council fails to implement changes in the tropical zone and southern countries because the regulations in these regions are not well-developed enough – it is set as an optional tool and that is not enough to make changes. This, of course, causes the greatest concern.”
A meta-analysis of scientific studies conducted in 2016 found that FSC certification requirements in the tropical zone have reduced degradation and improved working conditions and the environment in the affected forests – that is an achievement. But other, more precisely developed studies on forestry as a whole indicate that FSC has affected this process only slightly or not at all. Perhaps it is a matter of money, says Resources for the Future economist and author of a 2015 study on FSC certification in Mexico, Allen Blackman. Small-scale, low-quality forestry operations in the tropical zone are not rare, and the perpetrators of these operations are unlikely to be certified. Perhaps FSC has been unable to influence the forestry process for a simple reason: “in developing countries, a large portion of logging activities does not take place in accordance with forestry requirements,” says Blackman. Instead, the main influencing factor is unauthorised changes in land use, for example, the replacement of natural forests with agricultural land, farms, and palm plantations. Blackman and his co-authors conclude that the apparent ineffectiveness of certification should “give pause to policymakers who see the certificate as a tool with the potential to solve problems with deforestation.”
Together with the latest evidence of illegal activities among FSC-certified companies, consumers who have believed in the truthfulness of the FSC label may pause for a moment and think. For a while, the entire timber products industry, which has so far profited by turning a blind eye to the carrying out of illegal activities, may also be brought to a halt. Sooner or later, the industry will have to face the harsh reality – it needs a stricter forest certification system along with government-developed regulations, for example, on banning land conversion, if there is a desire to continue profiting from forests in the future.
Source: https://e360.yale.edu/features/greenwashed-timber-how-sustainable-forest-certification-has-failed