Laos:
FSC certified timber is illegal
When a forestry operation is certified
under the Forest Stewardship Council system, it should mean we
can all relax in the knowledge that the forests are reasonably
well managed. Unfortunately, it seems, this is not the case. SmartWood,
an FSC accredited certifier, recently certified forestry operations
in Laos which are producing timber that is illegal under the Lao
Forestry Law.
The FSC certification is the result
of more than a decade of aid projects and millions of dollars
of aid money. Between 1996 and 2000, a project funded by the World
Bank and the Finnish government set up a series of Village Forestry
Associations in Savannahkhet and Khammouane provinces in Laos.
The project, part of the Forest Management and Conservation Programme
(FOMACOP), aimed to develop a model of “village forestry”, through
which villagers would log the forests and receive a share of the
money from the timber.
The first attempt to determine whether
“village forestry” could be FSC certified came in 1999. But Lao
government officials were unhappy about any outside monitoring
of forestry operations. Rumours spread that government officials
were worried about losing a lucrative source of income: bribes
from the logging industry. FOMACOP collapsed in 2000, shortly
after the failed certification attempt.
The World Bank and the Finnish government
subsequently set up another project, this time called the Sustainable
Forestry and Rural Development Project (SUFORD). In May 2003,
SmartWood assessed the forest management. In January 2006, after
a series of conditions were met to SmartWood’s satisfaction, SmartWood
issued an FSC certificate for 39,000 hectares of forest managed
by six villages in Savannahkhet province. A month earlier, SmartWood
issued a certificate for about 10,000 hectares of village forestry
in Khammouane province.
WWF supported the certification together
with the Tropical Forest Trust, an organisation set up in 1999
to expand the area of FSC certified forest in the tropics. “FSC
certification of these forests is a giant step forward for sustainable
forestry and conservation in the region,” said Roland Eve, WWF’s
Country Director in Laos.
But a leaked consultant’s report from
the World Bank- and Finland-financed SUFORD project tells a different
story. The report documents the findings of a visit by a team
from the Lao Forestry Department and a consultant to the SUFORD
project, Tomas Jonsson. The team visited Thapanthong district
in Savannahkhet province between March and May 2006.
The team found that the certified logging
operations are not carried out in accordance with management plans.
“Documents were scattered and parts were missing” and “only partially
understood” by local forestry staff, loggers and villagers, according
to Jonsson’s report.
The team found that the villagers and
local forestry staff were “next to unable to use the tree maps”.
The maps were found to be inaccurate. In the forest, trees to
be logged were not adequately marked. Unmarked trees had been
logged. Some marked trees were left standing. Resin trees used
by villagers had been cut. Some large, good quality logs were
left in the felling area. Skid trails were not as marked on the
maps. Hardly surprising, as the logging crew didn’t have copies
of the maps. Neither did they have safety equipment or protective
gear. Logging crews lived under a tarpaulin, in a logging camp
with no washing facilities or toilets.
More trees were logged than in the management
plans because the province issued logging quotas “over and above
the harvestable volumes as per approved logging plans.” Several
areas had been logged which were not yet supposed to be harvested
according to the management plans. The team also found signs that
villagers were felling and processing sawnwood within the certified
area.
The team concluded that logging is not
controlled by the management plans but is driven by the demand
from an ever increasing number of local sawmills. Logging plans
are interpreted “as giving the right to cut a certain volume instead
of specifically permitting the selected and marked trees to be
removed,” according to Jonsson’s report.
With FSC certification it should be
possible to trace wood back to the specific location that it came
from in the forest, through a system of marking and tracking the
timber. “In all inspected locations (forest, landing, mill),”
the team found that “no tree or log was marked as per requirement.”
Logs that were marked did not have the appropriate number and
were often marked with chalk. “Tracing and chain of custody of
trees/logs is therefore impossible,” Jonsson wrote in his report.
The control team also found evidence
of illegal logging logging in areas where management plans were
non-existent or not yet approved. Without adequate timber marking,
there is no way of knowing whether timber from these or any other
illegal operations is being passed off as FSC certified timber.
But SmartWood knows all this. SmartWood’s
assessors issued a condition which states that “By the end of
Year 1, all logs must contain clear and lasting marks (e.g. paint
or chops) to identify the village, strip, and log number.”
It is illegal under the Lao Forestry
Law to move logs that are not appropriately marked. Before SmartWood’s
condition is met, therefore, FSC certified timber from Savannahkhet
is illegal under Lao law.
By Chris Lang, e-mail: http://chrislang.org,
www.chrislang.blogspot.com
