The Forest Stewardship Council is the world’s pre-eminent forest-products certification body, but companies selling FSC-certified products keep getting caught violating its standards.
The FSC’s standards rest on some of the most enlightened forestry practices in the world. By creating a specific market for ethical wood, the FSC aims to create a world of ethically run and sustainable forests. In September, a bust by US officials of wood illegally imported from Peru became the latest in a troubling series of cases where FSC-certified forestry operations have turned out not to follow FSC practices — or, in some cases, even the law. Critics say failures in the FSC’s certification process threaten to undermine the council’s mission.
In September 2015, a Peruvian cargo ship dropped off 71 shipping containers of rainforest wood on the docks of Houston, Texas. At 3.8 million pounds, the shipment was an ample demonstration of the continued flow of lumber from tropical countries into the Northern Hemisphere; laid out end to end it would have covered “several football fields” and had a retail value of $300,000, the Houston Chronicle reported.
And the wood’s fate shows the criminal practices that still haunt that trade: in early December, American customs officials blocked the import of the shipment, announcing that the wood had been cut illegally and shipped out of Peru on fraudulent permits. Peruvian police carried out further raids in the Amazonian port of Iquitos, resulting in the biggest bust of illegal wood in Peruvian history.
The busts were a black mark for a system intended to marshal the power of markets to protect the world’s forests from destructive logging, among other threats. Since the early 1990s, when attempts to build a system of international law to save the world’s tropical forests collapsed, a union of thousands of civil society, environmental, and corporate groups has turned their hope to the market. The international group they built, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), relies on consumer choice to protect the world’s timber market: it certifies operations as environmentally sustainable and socially responsible, with the idea that consumers will pay more for ethically sourced wood.
Over the last twenty years, the FSC has grown into the pre-eminent international forest-products certification body, uniting 30,000 member companies and certifying more than 180 million hectares of forest worldwide — an area bigger than Alaska. (There are many similar certification programs, but they are either very small or generally regarded as having less rigorous standards than the FSC. All together some 439 million hectares of forest are certified under one program or another, nearly 11 percent of the world’s total.)
