How Forest Certification Fails

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Logging in tiger habitat (Photo: Anatoly Kabanets / WWF-Russia)

When the Forest Stewardship Council got its start in 1993, it seemed to represent a triumph of market-based thinking over plodding command-and-control government regulation. Participants in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit had failed to reach agreement on government intervention to control rampant tropical deforestation. Instead, environmental organizations, social movements, and industry banded together to establish a voluntary system for improving logging practices and certifying sustainable timber.

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) soon set standards that seemed genuinely exciting to environmental and social activists, covering the conservation and restoration of forests, indigenous rights, and the economic and social well-being of workers, among other criteria. For industry, FSC certification promised not just a better way of doing business, but also higher prices for wood products carrying the FSC seal of environmental friendliness.

A quarter-century later, frustrated supporters of FSC say it hasn’t worked out as planned, except maybe for the higher prices: FSC reports that tropical forest timber carrying its label brings 15 to 25 percent more at auction. But environmental critics and some academic researchers say FSC has had little or no effect on tropical deforestation. Moreover, a number of recent logging industry scandals suggest that the FSC label has at times served merely to “greenwash” or “launder” trafficking in illegal timber:

In a 2014 report, Greenpeace, an FSC member, slammed the organization for standing by as FSC-certified loggers ravaged the Russian taiga, particularly the Dvinsky Forest, more than 700 miles north of Moscow. Greenpeace accused FSC-certified logging companies there of “wood-mining” forests the way they might strip-mine coal, as a nonrenewable resource, and of harvesting “areas that are either slated for legal protection or supposed to be protected as a part of FSC requirements.”

In 2015, the U.S. flooring company Lumber Liquidators pleaded guilty to smuggling illegal timber from the last habitat of the Siberian tiger in the Russian Far East. Its main supplier of solid oak flooring was a Chinese company named Xingjia, which held an FSC “chain of custody” certification, meaning it was licensed to handle FSC-certified timber. According to an investigator in the case, another Chinese company marketing to the United States offered to put an FSC label on illegal wood flooring in exchange for a 10 percent markup.
In Peru, investigators determined in 2016 that more than 90 percent of the timber on two recent shipments bound from the Amazon to Mexico and the U.S. was of illegal origin. In what it called an “unprecedented enforcement action,” the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative last October banned the main exporter in those shipments from the U.S. market. That company, Inversiones La Oroza, still boasts on its website that it “complies with the principles and criteria of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC),” though FSC finally suspended its certification in 2017.

The cases in China, Peru, and Romania all resulted from undercover operations by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. “We didn’t mean to go after FSC,” says David Gehl, that group’s Eurasia programs coordinator. FSC just kept turning up in the same places as a lot of illegal logging, he says. Many logging companies … To read the full article, click here.