FSC is misleading the public

28th May - 2008

Activists from Global Forests Coalition and World Rainforest Movement made their voices heard at a side event organized by the Forest Stewardship Council. After listening to 45 minutes of polite chat from the panel about how lovely FSC is, activists held up a banner reading “FSC: Stop Certifying Monoculture Tree Plantations”. They also read out parts of the statement below.

After a couple of questions and a short discussion, Stefan Salvador from FSC closed the meeting, although several more people wanted to ask questions and some pointed out that this should be a democratic space for discussing the problems with FSC.

“Forest certification according to the principles of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) balances social, environmental and economic interests. FSC requirements address all core elements of the UN Convention on Biodiversity. In fact, through FSC certification these have been successfully implemented in over 100 million ha of forests around the globe.”

The above statement is posted in FSC’s special section on its web site titled “FSC at the UN Conference of Biodiversity.” What the statement does not say is that the 100 million hectare figure hides millions of hectares of monoculture tree plantations that have been falsely certified as “forests”.

At the same time, it hides the fact that social and environmental movements from around the world have been for years denouncing tree plantations and demanding FSC to stop certifying them, because among many reasons they destroy biodiversity. This demonstrates that FSC is misleading the CBD with its statement.

Be they plantations of eucalyptus, pine, acacia or oil palm, these large scale monocultures
are mostly aimed at feeding northern consumers with growing volumes of raw materials extracted in southern countries at a huge social and environmental cost.

Local communities are displaced to give way to endless rows of identical trees that displace other life forms in the area. These plantations not only destroy biodiversity but they also deplete and pollute water resources while soils become degraded. Human rights violations are rife, ranging from the loss of livelihoods and displacement, to repression and even cases of torture and death.

Apart from having to confront governments and corporations, local communities struggling against large-scale monoculture tree plantations must face the additional problem posed by the fact that these same plantations are being given credibility through certification by the FSC. In fact, most core elements of the Convention on Biodiversity have been effectively violated in those millions of hectares of certified plantations around the globe.

Certification of plantations by FSC is symptomatic of the dominance of corporate interests in FSC. The credibility of FSC is increasingly undermined by certification of these and other destructive projects. Nowadays FSC’s decision-making is controlled by corporate interests which try to convince consumers that buying more timber products is good for biodiversity. This is undermining the efforts of environmental organizations, which are working on educating consumers on the need to reduce consumption.

Plantations are not forests and FSC should not certify them!

FSC should STOP being a tool for corporate interests!