Chile:
Has the CERTFOR label any value?
In the year 2000 Chilean forestry companies
announced the launching of their own forestry certification scheme,
CERTFOR. This label was created under the auspices of the Fundación
Chile, the Forestry Institute (Instituto Forestal - Infor) with
the financial support of the Corporation for the Promotion of
Production - CORFO (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción).
After having attempted to join FSC – seeking international legitimacy
– and following a negative answer, CERTFOR approached another
international certification system: PEFC. It was thus that in
October 2004, the Chilean CERTFOR certification system was internationally
endorsed by PEFC.
The certifying companies accredited
to carry out the audits are QMI Toronto and SGS. It is surprising
that the latter is also accredited in the FSC system and that
has been repeatedly questioned over its certification of plantations
under this system. Perhaps it has mixed up the manuals of procedure?
So far CERTFOR has certified seven forestry
operations in Chile, covering no less than a total of 1,600,000
certified hectares. Among these are the vast plantations of two
of the most powerful groups in Chile: the Arauco Group and the
Mininco Group.
This system is based on 9 principles
accompanied by a number of criteria and indicators. Beyond these
principles and indicators it is important to point out that CERTFOR
is able to certify in one go all the plantations of a given company.
This is the case with Bosques Arauco, a company that has been
granted with a single certificate a label for 280,000 hectares
distributed in 950 different plantation units. The same has happened
in the case of Forestal Celco and Forestal Cholguán (also belonging
to the Arauco Group) which have been granted certification for
446,100 hectares distributed in 2150 different plantation units.
Needless to say the certifiers only visited a fraction of these
units, going to show the system’s lack of reliability.
Among its principles, the CERTFOR label
does not make any mention of the use of transgenic trees, so it
would not be surprising if in the future it were also to certify
transgenic plantations. This gap has a very simple explanation:
Fundación Chile – one of the creators of this scheme – is one
of the organizations that has been most actively involved in the
genetic engineering of trees.
Beyond the theory, practice itself shows
sufficient elements to point out that none of these plantations
should ever have been certified…by anybody!
In the first place, the Chilean forestry
model was promoted during the Pinochet dictatorship and expanded
on territories that historically belonged to Chilean indigenous
people: the Mapuche People.
The impacts caused by the powerful expansion
of forestry companies in the south of Chile are well documented:
the destruction of native forests, the depletion and pollution
of water resources due to the use of agrochemicals, uncontrolled
erosion, destruction of biodiversity, the decline and even disappearance
of wildlife and vegetation, health problems in the local population
due to the use of agrochemicals, just to mention a few.
But fundamentally in Chile “forestry
development” has led to serious negative impacts on the Mapuche
People. It is not by chance that the increase in poverty of the
Mapuche population coincides with the concentration of tree plantations.
In spite of the millions of dollars of profits received by the
companies, the forestry locations with a high Mapuche population
in the Eighth and Ninth Regions are the areas where the highest
levels of poverty and extreme poverty are to be found.
The advances of the Chilean forestry
model are causing an ethnocide of the Mapuche People, a sufficiently
important argument to prevent any certification of a Chilean forestry
company operating in these territories. However, the CERTFOR certifiers
do not even seem to be aware of the problem.
The Mapuche communities’ principle focus
of conflict over territorial claims is with the forestry companies,
mainly with Forestal Mininco and with the companies grouped in
Bosques Arauco. This has given rise to hundreds of people being
arrested, sentenced and condemned, dozens of people wounded, and
hundreds of mobilizations as a balance and result of the many
demonstrations aimed not only at recovering lands but also at
curbing expansion of plantations and of the serious consequences
being denounced against the forestry companies.
Moreover, the Mapuche people have had
to lament the death of two young men who were brutally murdered
by the guards of Forestal Mininco during mobilizations to recover
their land. So how could CERTFOR give Forestal Mininco a certificate
for its 540,766 hectares?
Summing up, the CERTFOR label deceives
consumers and is an affront to the Mapuche communities that are
suffering the serious impacts of these plantations. We therefore
permit ourselves to make a suggestion: perhaps they could change
the pine on their logo for a skull and crossbones. It would not
look so nice, but it would better reflect the true situation.
Article based on information from: CERTFOR,
http://www.CERTFOR.org; Defensores
del Bosque Chileno,
http://www.elbosquechileno.cl/41fsc.html; “Modelo forestal
chileno y Movimiento autónomo Mapuche: Las posiciones irreconciliables
de un conflicto territorial” (The Chilean
Forestry Model and the Autonomous Mapuche Movement: the irreconcilable
positions of a territorial conflict)by Alfredo Seguel,
http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/Chile/modelo_forestal_chileno.html;
Previous WRM bulletins, available at
http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/Chile.html
