Examination of Witnesses (Questions 227-239)
MR MIKE
CLARK, MR
MARTIN GALE
AND MR
BEN GUNNEBERG
1 NOVEMBER 2005
Q227 Chairman: Mr Clark, Mr Gunneberg
and Mr Gale, welcome. I am pleased that you were able to sit in
for the earlier session that we have already had. I just want
to ask you from the very outset if you could just tell us a little
bit about your work, how you came together as an organisation
and to summarise for us how you function?
Mr Clark: I am Mike Clark. Martin
is ready to do that, but I thought if I just say who we are so
that you have some feel for the sort of answers you are going
to get from us.
Q228 Chairman: By all means.
Mr Clark: Martin Gale is a UK
Forestry Commissioner and is also Vice President for International
Forestry, UPM-Kymmene Corporation. Ben Gunneberg is the Secretary
General of the PEFC Council, based in Luxembourg. I, Mike Clark,
am the Vice President in the consumer packaging division of M-real
Corporation, another international paper based group. Martin,
I think you would like to comment on the question.
Mr Gale: Yes, thank you very much,
Chairman. Just before going into the very brief history of PEFC
I would like to set that history against the context of world
fibre trade. If you take the total amount of trees that are harvested
in the world annually 50% of them are cut for fuel wood and clearance
purposes, which includes the destruction of tropical forests for
agro-crops such as Soya and also palm oil, which is an increasing
problem of great concern to everybody—industry and the NGOs.
That is, 50% of the trees felled today will never be certified.
Of the other 50%, that is fibre, trees going to an industrial
end use—someone is making a conscious effort to fell the
tree because it is being purchased in order to turn it into a
product—currently 20% of that, so 10% of all trees felled,
are covered by one certification scheme or another. So I think
it is important, when we start considering the legal timber and
sustainable forest management that we look at what is at the moment
a very poor performance by all concerned in terms of pushing forward
credible, certified timber. PEFC came about in 1999 and came about
primarily as an initiative driven by the small forest owner. The
dynamics of forest ownership throughout the world vary; for example
in this country 50% of UK forests are owned by the government
and 50% are owned by private owners. That is not a similar pattern
throughout the world. There are currently some 15 million forest
owners within the European sphere who own less than five hectares
each, and it is a flow of income for them at some point during
the cycle of growing trees. They felt, in 1999, that their particular
interests were not well represented within this growing demand
for credible certified products, and through a number of measures
PEFC was born and very much focused on what is pertinent and relevant
to the national requirements of the various countries that were
interested. So PEFC is an umbrella scheme which takes into account
the independent national forest certification schemes and brings
them under this umbrella process. So it addresses the interests
of the small forest owner and is very much in focus on the affordable
cost of certification for these particular types of forest owners.
It is very easy for large corporations or large state owned forests
to deliver forest certification at a stroke of a pen; it is very
much more difficult for the small forest owner, and many companies
have now organised—and the company that I work for primarily—group
certification schemes that allow the small forest owners to be
involved in the certification process. So I think it has been
created as a result of those particular drivers.
Q229 Chairman: It is interesting
because I read an article that was in ENDS which said that your
organisation had come about because of the high profile that NGOs
had, but you are saying that it was not anything to do with that,
it was really the way small owners wanted to come together?
Mr Gale: It is the creation of
a complementary certification scheme that delivers choice into
a market place.
Q230 Chairman: So what does your
label actually guarantee to customers?
Mr Gunneberg: The PEFC scheme
is based on the inter-governmental processes which define sustainable
forest management, a collection of national laws and multi-stakeholder
input into the definition of what a sustainable forest management
standard is. Therefore, when you have all those particular elements
brought together you are then assessed against an international
set of criteria, and the PEFC Council, for example, has 244 requirements
which each certification scheme must meet. So the label provides
an assurance of a consistent approach towards certification, bearing
in mind the diversity of the different types of forest, the diversity
of the political, geographical, biological, geological and all
the other aspects which determine the different types of forest
ownership, management and so on. It delivers a consistent approach
to saying that these forests are sustainably managed and meet
the same rigorous requirements and/or delivers those rigorous
requirements.
Q231 Chairman: But I am not quite
clear what you do that is different from what FSC does, or what
FSC does that you do not do?
Mr Clark: I think Martin made
the point earlier, we see ourselves as complementary schemes.
We come at it from different directions. PEFC is essentially a
mutual recognition type of organisation; in other words, we assess
different national schemes against the 200 and however many criteria
that we have, and we ensure that those schemes all meet those
objectives. But they are independent, national and separate schemes
and we are providing a system of mutual recognition for them.
FSC differs from us in that sense in that it has a single scheme,
set of criteria, and judges everything against that one set, whereas
we are looking at separate national schemes.
Q232 Chairman: Mr Gale?
Mr Gale: I would just like to
illustrate that with two practical illustrations. The company
that I work for operates globally. We have forests in Scandinavia
and we have plantations in the UK and increasingly in Uruguay.
We choose as a company PEFC in Scandinavia and FSC where we are
creating plantations. The reason we make that choice is because
where you have a significant change of land use, i.e. you are
going from agriculture to industrial plantation, then FSC's social
aspects are much more pertinent in those national circumstances
because we are very much interested and want to take account of
the social points of view, the social impacts in a major land
use change. Where you have the history of forestry that has been
in place for centuries and has been managed actively for centuries
within a community environment, those social aspects are not as
important as some of the more technical aspects. So it is back
to this choice, that PEFC is a preferred scheme where certain
national circumstances dictate it and FSC is a preferred scheme
for similar reasons.
Q233 Chairman: Basically what you
are saying is that there are not the same minimal standards across
countries because you can pick and choose whether or not you take
into account the social aspect in respect of the sustainable definition?
Mr Gale: There is a basic common
denominator of standards. The FSC process does allow us, for example,
in Uruguay where we are converting 250,000 hectares of ex-grazing
land to eucalyptus plantation, as we speak, and we are halfway
through that process. What we have done so far has been certified
under FSC; we have just been reassessed and commended through
the FSC process, and we will plant the rest of that 250,000 under
FSC because the pertinent criteria are relevant to a major land
use change. If you do not have a major land use change you do
not need to be asking the questions that are contained within
some of those social criteria.
Q234 Chairman: So is there a common
denominator that goes across all the different places where you
operate and, if so, what is it?
Mr Gale: Yes. I think the proof
of that is that within the United Kingdom's national forest certification
standard—United Kingdom Woodland Assurance Scheme (UKWAS)
where both FSC and PEFC have endorsed the UK standard. So there
must be basic sets of criteria with which both organisations are
happy, and indeed UKWAS is a benchmark national standard for planet
earth.
Q235 Chairman: Can I move on and
ask how it actually works because in the earlier evidence that
we heard our attention was drawn to the effectiveness of monitoring
that took place. Do you just take as read what appears on the
paper in front of you? I can see you expressing surprise at that,
so how do you actually monitor that what you were told actually
works?
Mr Gunneberg: There are several
levels. First of all there is standard setting, then there is
certification which actually takes place to a standard, and then
there is somebody to monitor that the certification bodies are
competent to do their work, and that is done by an independent
national government-approved accreditation body. When we talk
about the monitoring, if I have understood the question correctly,
the monitoring process of PEFC works in that we have 244 requirements
for certification schemes which they must meet.
Q236 Chairman: How do you know that
they do meet that standard?
Mr Gunneberg: We have a very rigorous
process where we use external consultants who undertake an assessment
of the certification schemes. It usually takes nine months and
in the longest case it was one and a half years. It consists of
a process where an independent consultant assesses the scheme,
undertakes a global public consultation on the scheme, takes into
consideration all the comments that are received, writes a report
on all of the 244 requirements, gives their opinion on those 244
requirements and that report is then given to PEFC members, which
are all the schemes and their national multi-stakeholders. They
make an informed choice whether the schemes meet the requirements
or not, and that full report—everything—is then made
publicly available on the PEFC website. So both the full certification
standard and the full independent audit of a national certification
scheme are available on the website.
Q237 Chairman: In respect of those
reports, have you had any examples or any instances where you
have felt that the monitoring means for the people that you have
been monitoring is not up to standard, and do you have a complaints
procedure that you have instigated?
Mr Gunneberg: Yes, the monitoring,
which I have explained to you, is at international level but of
course there is a monitoring at a whole range of levels, right
down to the local level which is done by the certification bodies.
When we talk about the complaint procedures, the complaint procedure
is made available by all who make decisions in the whole process.
So, for example, the standard setting body nationally, which includes
all the stakeholders, has to have a written complaints procedure;
the certification bodies have their complaints procedures; and
the accreditation body must also have a complaints procedure.
So there are three levels of complaints procedures which are formal.
Then of course there are the informal ones which go through the
consultation. All of those are guided by the ISO Guides on this
particular area to ensure that we follow the same approach as
any other standardisation process used for any other sector.
Q238 Mr Ainsworth: Would you like
to comment on the example that we heard about earlier from Austria—clipboard
and a tick box?
Mr Clark: You ring up and you
tick a box and you are certified apparently or something like
that?
Mr Gunneberg: It is not how I
recognise it. Every forest owner who wishes to be audited in Austria
commits themselves to the certification standard. Austria has
a regional certification approach. Regional is a form of group
certification but it is undertaken within geographical boundaries,
to make it possible for more forest owners to become involved
in the forest certification of the forests with which they are
involved. Very often if you have five hectares there is only a
certain amount that you can do. If you are, for example, in an
area of conservation value significance then of course that area
needs to be protected and in some areas you will be in an area
where there will be more focus on productive aspects. So from
a regional approach you have to meet all elements of achieving
the balance of social, economic and environmental.
Q239 Mr Ainsworth: Are you basically
saying that the evidence we heard earlier this afternoon was untrue,
that it did not happen?
Mr Gunneberg: I think the evidence
that was provided this afternoon was incomplete; I think there
may be a mistaken perception on how this particular issue works,
with which I would be happy to provide you with further information
as to how it actually does happen.
Chairman: If you wanted to provide that
we would be very happy to receive it. Mr Challen.
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