Examination of Witnesses (Questions 198-199)
MR DUNCAN
BRACK, MS
JADE SAUNDERS
AND MS
EMILY FRIPP
1 NOVEMBER 2005
Q198 Chairman: Good afternoon.
Welcome to Mr Brack, Ms Saunders and Ms Fripp. You have heard
some of the earlier part of our session this afternoon, so we
will plough on very quickly. Thank you very much indeed for coming
along and giving evidence to us this afternoon. By way of introduction,
could you give me some background as too why Chatham House is
making this such an important issue? We have heard earlier on
that there is perhaps lack of leadership in various other places.
Why is this so important that you should put so much effort at
Chatham House into working on this whole issue?
Mr Brack: Thank you for the opportunity
to talk to you. I should emphasise at the beginning—and
you may well know—that at Chatham House we very strictly
are not an advocacy organisation; we do not have a corporate view
on any issue. So our individual researchers express views of their
own, but they are not corporate. Having said that, I suspect that
all three of us agree with each other on this. We came at this
issue five or six years ago from a background of working on trade
and environment issues—the inter-relationship between WTO
rules and environmental issues—and on international environmental
crime, for example on wildlife, ozone depleting substances or
fish, and more generally on environmental regimes and environmental
governance. Most of the work we have done on this since has been
funded by the UK Government, and I think they saw us—as
we like to think of ourselves—as a place with convening
power. We are a neutral organisation, people trust us to run meetings
and events where we are not trying to put over a view, and we
give space to actors from across the spectrum to express their
own views. One of the things we do is to run a whole series of
consultation and update meetings that have really developed into
a focus for the debate on this—in Europe, at least. And
we run a website[37]
with up to date information on everything that is happening. In
addition to that, we are an independent research organisation
and we have done a lot of the work that I think has helped to
back up things that have happened in the EU and amongst the UK,
particularly on ways of controlling imports of illegal timber
because that relates to our previous work on trade environment
and environmental crime. It is around the licensing system and
around procurement and so on. So certainly the work has developed
much more than we thought it would do to start with, but I think
that is a reflection of the effort and the focus that the UK Government
in particular has put into this issue over the last five or six
years, really actually since 1998 when it was the Chair of the
G8 and created the G8 Action Programme on Forests.
Q199 Chairman: Thank you. In terms of
the stakeholder meetings that you have been having, which I understand
are funded by Dfid, arising out of the discussions that you have
had with them, is there a meeting of minds with the retailers,
the producers, with the NGOs? Also, in respect of Dfid's interests
as well. I am thinking particularly about the Commission for Africa.
Is there a meeting of minds about how this should all be taken
forward that you have come to understand? Or is the gap larger
than ever?
Mr Brack: If you go back to where
we started five years ago people were only just beginning to think
about this, and I think as Saskia said in the earlier session
the whole issue has grown in political profile quite rapidly over
the last five or six years. Certainly there are wide differences
of opinion and you saw that in the last session. What we are about
is giving everybody an opportunity to debate with each other and
to have dialogue with each other, and our participants in our
meetings are drawn from governments from all over the world, from
international organisations, from NGOs and from industry. So I
think that probably people would accept that they have been a
useful forum for debate. I am sure that there will continue to
be differences of opinion over the policy options, and that is
a very healthy thing. I think it is useful to have NGOs always
criticising government and driving them in the right direction,
and industry as well. What we aim to do is to provide the platform
for that kind of debate to happen.
Ms Saunders: Could I just add
briefly, that although, as Duncan said, there is not necessarily
consensus on the solution there is a growing consensus on the
fact that it is a problem, and I think that is one of the things
that we have seen recently, that the UK trade have, from a few
years ago—and Emily has worked with the trade more than
I have—they were at a point where there was a lot of, "It
is not us, Guv, talk to the bad guys, we are the more high street
names," and things, to a recognition that all consumers have
a part to play in solving these problems and recognising them.
I think a consensus around the fact that it is a problem that
needs to be addressed has emerged, and I think emerged out of
Chatham House meetings to an extent.
Ms Fripp: Something that one of
the traders said to me recently was, "Five years ago you
would have never even sat around a table with NGOs and talked
about stuff, let alone let them ask you, `Can you prove that what
you are selling in B & Q or wherever, in whichever shop, is
actually legal?'" And now they do have some form of dialogue—whether
it goes anywhere and what it results in is not the issue—and
I think that is a huge step forward compared to five years ago.
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