19 February 2001
Environmental organisations call for credible forest certification and reject IFIR mutual recognition proposal

Rome, Italy - Greenpeace and WWF recently stressed that rigorous forest certification is an important tool to help preserve the world's remaining forests and to guarantee responsible forest management at the meeting "Building Confidence Among Forest Certification Schemes and their Supporters" .

Any certification system needs to ensure maximum credibility to avoid the risk of confusing industry and consumers. WWF and Greenpeace reject the proposal by the International Forest Industries Roundtable (IFIR) for mutual recognition of forest certification schemes.

"Mutual recognition must not become a process for weakening standards," stated Christoph Wiedmer, Greenpeace Forest Campaigner. "We reject the IFIR mutual recognition proposal as fundamentally flawed and a significant step backwards for forests, forest certification, and consumers."

Greenpeace and WWF recognize that the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is currently the only system ensuring credible certification of good forest management. The statutes and requirements of the FSC clearly reflect international agreements reached at the Earth summit in Rio and thereafter.

The FSC was designed and established jointly by social interest groups, environmental organizations and forest industries. Its principles and criteria and procedures are currently seen as the minimum requirements for any forest certification initiative worldwide.

Responding to the growing success of the FSC, several weaker certification initiatives were created over the past few years. These initiatives have yet to prove that they can deliver substantial improvement of forest management and guarantee that biological diversity, as well as social benefits, are preserved.

So far, none of these initiatives meets the expectations of the consumers, the corporate sector and major environmental non-governmental organisations towards a credible label for forest products.

Despite wide differences between certification initiatives, IFIR recently compiled a proposal to create an international framework for mutual recognition between different forest certification schemes. The IFIR calls on the FSC to relax its requirements, but not for better forest management and protection of ecological and social forest values.

"The FSC has shown that it improves forest management substantially and provides credible certification. The world's forests now need better management to achieve the standards of the FSC rather than more certification schemes or mutual recognition frameworks," said Heiko Liedeker, Chairman of the European Forest Team of WWF.

WWF and Greenpeace point out that the FSC is already providing an equitable global accreditation framework for the mutual recognition of forest certification schemes. A growing number of certification systems already recognize each other under the FSC umbrella and still more are seeking FSC endorsement. The FSC has been operating its accreditation system with unprecedented success since 1993.

The meeting in Rome was hosted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (Rome, Italy), the International Tropical Timber Organization (Yokohama, Japan) and the GTZ: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit GmbH (Eschborn, Germany).