Certified Forestry Runs Into a Snag:
The Gabon Situation
Certified forestry offers the potential to separate forest products derived from properly managed logging and those from careless habitat destruction. The danger is that such promising advances in sustainable forestry will be used as an excuse to log virtually all remaining virgin forests. And once logged, however sensitively and carefully, a primary forest is irrevocably changed.
Certified forestry offers the best hope to reform a hopelessly unsustainable forest product industry worldwide. It is critical, however, that distinctions be made between forests that will be preserved in perpetuity in a natural state as "ecological cores" and those that will be sustainably managed as certified, natural forests. A healthy forest ecosystem would be composed of both, in spatial configurations and relative proportions sufficient to maintain ecosystem functionality on a particular landscape. Some ancient forest wildernesses are too sacred and important ecologically for logging of any sort.
An African rainforest that is home to scores of endangered species, including the rare lowland gorilla was the scene for a rancorous debate within the certification community. FSC, the world's umbrella organization for "sustainable" timber unwittingly approved wholesale logging on primary forest.
The French company Leroy Gabon planned to log on over 518,000 acres of primary forest in and around the Lope Reserve in the former French colony of Gabon. The prime target was the tropical softwood okoume, primarily for the European plywood market.
Principle 9 of the FSC guidelines indicates that to be considered "certified," a logging operation must not destroy primary forest. Yet the FSC-approved certifier, SGS, gave Leroy the green light to log, even though much of the planned logging would take place in primary forest.
Rainforest Action Network and Friends of the Earth called FSC on the decision. One of the most immediate consequences of Leroy's logging is "the construction of many roads which give access to illegal hunters," according to Friends of the Earth. Giuseppe Vassallo of the Panda/Milano Rainforest Action Group confirms this fear, pointing out that similar logging operations in Gabon have caused a rapid increase in poaching in previously "remote and uninhabited zones." Gorillas and chimpanzees are killed for their meat, to be sold as far away as South Africa, and for their heads and hands, still fashioned into souvenirs.
Even though FSC rules require a certification program to be independent from the rest of the forest industry, SGS has other divisions that stand to profit from contracts with governments and multinational corporations.
The FSC's endorsement of this disaster would have damaged the overall credibility of sustainable logging. Consumers and environmental groups depend on certification programs to separate properly managed logging from careless habitat destruction. "Certifying operations that do not meet [FSC] standards is a betrayal of that trust," Friends of the Earth and the German rainforest protection group Rettet den Regenwald (Save the Rainforest) told the FSC in a recent letter.
FSC Steps Up to Bat
FSC decided the Leroy-Gabon logging operations do not deserve to be certified and that the certification "should be withdrawn immediately." In addition, the FSC has taken a number of steps to keep this from happening anywhere else and to ensure that the certification company working in Africa cannot make similar mistakes again.
The FSC has put a 6-month moratorium "on all new certificates for forest management operations that involve timber harvesting in primary [old growth] forests."
Rainforest Action Network: Julio Feferman: ranweaver@ran.org
http://www.ran.org
From: Worldwide Forest/Biodiversity Campaign News: http://forests.org/