The world's trees are in trouble. Half of global forests have disappeared, deforestation continues, and the health of remaining forests is declining rapidly. Friends of the Earth is calling for strong controls on the forest industry and a halt to illegal logging and the unsustainable conversion of forests to agriculture and pastures. We oppose "carbon sink" schemes that replace diverse forests with tree plantations. We need drastic reductions in energy consumption and paper use and the export of grains for cattle feed in order to conserve the forests that remain.
We believe that sustainable forest management and small-scale agriculture can best be left to Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and that these people should be granted land and resource rights.
Photo credit: WWF - Cannon
Illegal logging
Each year 13 million hectares of forest dissappear according to the UN, illegal logging being one of the main causes.
 
This illegal logging:
-
causes extreme losses of unique plants and animals
-
has huge impacts on the lives of indigenous peoples depending on those forest.
-
contributes to climate change
-
costs timber producing countries 10 to 15 billion dollars a year, according to the World Bank
- distorts markets: illegal timber is much cheaper than its sustainable equivalent
The EU on illegal logging
In 2003 the European Union (EU) launched the Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan to combat illegal logging and related trade. Read more here.
The EU has been mainly working on two aspects of the FLEGT Action Plan:
1) Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs)
VPAs aim to help signatory countries improve their governance and law enforcement and help themimplement a licensing system to ensure that they only export legal timber to Europe.
To date only Ghana has signed a Voluntary Partnership Agreement. Other countries that have officially started negotiations are Cameroon, Malaysia, Indonesia and Congo Brazzaville whereas others are lining up to start. VPAs have substantial potential pitfalls, which are described in a joint NGO statement [September 2006]. For example, VPAs will most probably not include secondary processed products and circumvention via China and other countries specialized in wood processing.
2) Additional options for further measures
As a major consumer of timber, accounting for an estimated 16-19% of global illegal timber imports, the EU has a duty to reduce its impact on forest ecosystems regardless of where their effects occur. Strong additional legislation at EU level is needed to guarantee that only timber and timber based products from legal sources are placed on the EU market. This legislation should make Member State governments and corporate actors accountable, reduce their environmental and social footprint on the world’s forests and help set an example for reform of the international forestry sector. Friends of the Earth welcome the legislative proposal, put forward by the European Commission after six years of debate. However, the draft law proposed by the Commission is too weak to achieve these goals. NGOs therefore urge the Council and the European Parliament to make vital amendments to transform this law into an effective and therefore credible tool to fight illegal forest destruction.
|
