FSC Global Forestry Update - Featured Editorial

For the past couple of years the European Union has been developing legislation to address the issue of illegal timber products being traded on its markets. The legislation has been approved by the European Parliament and while overall it constitutes a step in the right direction, additional elements are necessary to prevent it from having negative impacts on efforts to move forestry to a more sustainable basis.

The legislation is based on the principle of due diligence, which requires legal or natural persons placing timber products in a European country to establish systems to avoid dealing in illegal products. The due diligence requirement constitutes a risk management approach, with the following elements: access to information, risk assessment and risk mitigation.

Illegal products are defined as products harvested outside of nationally or internationally applicable legislation, including rights to harvest, payment of duties and taxes related to harvest rights and timber, environmental, labor and community welfare legislation, third parties’ legal or customary rights and forest related trade and customs legislation.

The approved legislation requires that only the first point of entry in a European country is responsible for implementing a due diligence system, with simplified traceability requirements regarding operators further down the supply chain.

In order for this legislation to act in a way that is complementary to certification efforts of promoting positive changes in forestry it is important that the legislation:

• effectively recognize the contribution of credible certification schemes, such as FSC, which include clear requirements regarding compliance with legislation. The approved EU legislation establishes that certification shall be taken into account in assessing the risk of a given timber product. However, it is not currently clear if this will represent an additional burden to operations supplying FSC certified products.

• contain a clear rationale about it being the minimum acceptable and that in no way it substitutes the need for mechanisms to promote best practices in forestry, such as certification. The risk is that there are fewer incentives for forest companies to move towards best practices if simple compliance with legislation is considered enough.

• does not allow timber products coming from legal deforestation to be considered as legal in the European market. There are countries around the world that still allow deforestation to happen legally and in some of them it is actually easier to legally produce wood in line with legislation regarding deforestation than with the legal requirements for forest management. If the EU legislation fails to address this issue, it may actually represent an incentive for deforestation in some countries, which would be contrary to its intent.

The approved EU legislation is a positive development, which reflects concerns regarding illegal logging. However, if it wishes to have a truly positive impact in making the forest sector more sustainable, it needs to ensure that it does not result in decreased incentives for the implementation of best practices.

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