Dear Jean-Pierre Kiekens & others, You have raised some important questions here. > But do we need sound governmental action AND certification at the same time? Or is the former sufficient? For any given forest management policies, there must be the political will & support by the local/federal government in order for it to succeed. Certification is no exception. > What is in fact certification useful for? If a forest is sustainably managed, certification only brings an incremental financial burden on the forest manager while it does not bring any additional environmental benefit. So, certification does not help in this case. The 'green premium' has been very much understated in most cases. If one were to review the professional fees schedule of most certifiers, one can safely conclude that the additional cost could be between 20% to even 50% to the timber products. Here at MTC, we will be conducting a pilot study on the chain of custody thru' a certifier for timber from a forest plantation to the Dutch markets. The fees for this study alone is shocking! > If the forest is not managed according to the certification requirements, certification does not provide that much of an incentive for things to change. This is because the markets for certified timber are very small (only a few "niche" markets in a few industrialised countries) and because many producers are to a large extent excluded from certification (for example loggers on conversion forests in the tropics and small-scale private forest holdings in regions such as Europe and North America). > > Sustainable forest management can of course happen without third party certification. Certification is neither necessary nor sufficient for sustainable forest management to occur. On the other hand, sustainable forest management cannot exist without governmental action. Would NGOs be somewhat rationale, they would drop their demands for third party certification and push for sound governmental action. One of which is the practise of shifting cultivation resulting in the slashing & burning of the world's tropical forests. This in turn is related directly to the poverty question which WWF has been circumventing to date. > In contrary to Sullivan's thinking, I doubt certification provides any hope for the world's forests. I rather believe that certifification provides power and funding to environmental NGOs such as WWF and to "independent" inspection companies - which would explain their support to this instrument. Agreed. NGOs demanding for certification do not even agree/know what are the C&Is in sustainable forestry. This was demonstrated in the last UBC-UPM & Brisbane Conferences on Certification. At these two conferences, there were even disagreements between foresters. Afterall eco-solicitation is fair game. > As far as forestry management is concerned, it remains to be demonstrated that certification can do something positive to achieve sustainability. Strangely, WWF has avoid mentioning the practises of European logging operations in Africa. Why? Last but not least, WWF cannot hope to address the problems of the world's tropical forests by ignoring ITTO. Regards, Nelson Wong MTC
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