Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-125)
MR DUNCAN
BRACK AND
MS ALISON
HOARE
16 DECEMBER 2008
Q120 Mr Caton: What about the Government's
own procurement policy, has that had a beneficial impact?
Mr Brack: Yes. I think the UK
procurement policy and other governments' procurement policy have
been the main outcome probably that has had an impact on the timber
market. Of all the discussions and conferences and initiatives
that have taken place over the last years or so, procurement policies
are the thing that so far has made most of the difference.
Q121 Mr Caton: So we can be confident
that there is less illegal timber coming into this country now
than before those measures?
Mr Brack: Being precise, what
we know is that more certified timber is coming into the UK and
also the Netherlands, which is the other country that has systematically
looked at this, so you would assume that the proportion of illegal
timber that is coming in is less, certainly.
Q122 Mr Caton: Do you believe that
the amount of illegal timber being produced across the world now
is reduced as a result of the roll out of the certification scheme?
Mr Brack: That is a difficult
question to answer. It is difficult to disentangle the effects
of everything that has happened. There is undoubtedly much bigger
awareness of the issue now than over the last 10 years. Procurement
policies have made a difference. The expectation of the FLEGT
licensing scheme has made a difference. Even countries like the
US have done things like begun to write provisions on illegal
logging into their free trade agreements. So you have seen at
least some countries, Indonesia is a good example, put much more
attention on to enforcement. There have been some notably successful
major enforcement operations in countries like Indonesia. On the
other hand, the timber trade has grown quite substantially. A
lot of it now passes through China. China is increasingly an importer
of raw timber and then processes it into plywood or finished products,
furniture or whatever and exports it to the West. There is not
much evidence so far that China is paying much attention to controlling
its imports and trying to exclude illegal sources, though there
have been discussions and again rising interest. The one concrete
thing we do know is that the proportion of the world's forests
that are certified doubled between 2002 and 2007. That is very
rapid growth and much higher than there has been in previous years.
Almost certainly that is as a result of all this concentration
on illegal logging and the development of government procurement
policies. The worrying thing about that is that only 7% of certified
forest is in developing countries and that proportion has not
changed over that period. It is developing countries that have
the main problems with forestry governance.
Q123 Mr Caton: That is welcome news
about the growth in certified forests, but is that process continuing
and is it getting into those developing countries?
Mr Brack: Yes, it is continuing.
You are seeing more national certification schemes develop. It
is slower and more difficult in developing countries precisely
because they have the problems with governance and enforcement
that we have talked about a lot. There is a lot that could be
done with procurement. In our written evidence we suggested a
variety of things that could be undertaken. There are some government
mechanisms, like the "Building Schools for the Future"
programme, for example, which does not include a requirement for
legal timber and that could be relatively easily built into it.
Implementation of any kind of timber procurement in local government
is quite patchy. In a sense that matters less in the UK because
the UK is quite a highly centralised country and more total government
spend is accounted for by central government in the UK than in
more decentralised countries like Germany or the Netherlands,
but local government is still about 30% of the public sector spend
in the UK and certainly more could be done in promoting this policy
or similar policies in local authorities.
Q124 Chairman: Are the certification
schemes themselves robust and reliable?
Mr Brack: That is a very good
question.
Q125 Chairman: Do you mean the answer
is no?
Mr Brack: Coming from a research
institute, I would like to say that more research would be needed.
They were never designed in the first place to be the kind of
keys to market access that they are becoming. They were designed
as voluntary mechanisms for relatively niche markets for those
consumers who wanted to buy sustainable timber. Now, increasingly,
they are being used as a requirement for market access for procurement
policies or, if something like the due diligence regulation comes
into force, for all imports to the EU potentially. So clearly
the incentives to defraud them are climbing quite steeply. There
are already anecdotal stories of more certified timber coming
out of China or East Asia than you would expect. It is quite questionable
whether certification schemes have the ability to police that.
They are voluntary associations. They do not really have an enforcement
capacity. I think that is quite an urgent issue for governments
to look at and see how they can use their enforcement capability
to reinforce the systems that the certification schemes have come
up with and if that is not addressed that will undermine the whole
effort towards tackling illegal logging.
Ms Hoare: There has been a lot
of concern about the robustness of certain schemes, but overall
they have had a positive impact and have helped to improve the
performance of the industry. In Central Africa there has been
some very significant progress particularly in how timber companies
deal with local communities. I think in the next year there should
be significant areas of the forest that become certified. Although
there are serious concerns, I think overall it is still a positive
contribution.
Chairman: Good. Thank you both very much
for coming in.
| 
