ENVIRONMENT: EU Takes a Weak Step Against Logging

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Sep 4 2008 (IPS) - The European Union has reached a new agreement aimed at preventing import of illegal timber from Africa, but environmental campaigners believe bolder action is needed to curb deforestation across the globe.

Under a deal reached with Ghana Sep. 3, the EU has undertaken to establish border controls to prevent unlicensed wood from the West African state entering the Union’s 27 countries. Known as a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA), the deal also commits the EU to aiding the Accra authorities in developing an improved system for monitoring a wood trade worth 400 million dollars per year. More than half of Ghana’s annual timber exports are destined for Europe.

The accord has been given a guarded welcome by conservation groups. Kyeretwie Opoku from the organisation Forest Watch Ghana said that it could help to crack down on such problems as corruption and in ensuring a more sustainable management of the country’s natural resources. But Opoku expressed concern that the agreement would be separate to other anti-deforestation schemes operating in Ghana, such as one financed by the World Bank, and says that proper links need to be established between the various programmes and donors involved.

Ghana is one of several countries involved in negotiating VPAs with the EU; others include Cameroon, Congo, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Russia and China have not yet entered such talks, though they are reported to be two of the largest suppliers of illegal wood to the EU.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) recently published estimates that the volume of illegal timber imports into the EU in 2006 could have been as high as 31 million cubic metres. That would be equivalent to almost one-fifth of the Union’s total timber imports.

Deforestation – as a result of both logging and the conversion of woodland to agriculture – accounts for around 20 percent of all emissions of greenhouse gases per year. This makes the forestry sector an even larger contributor to climate change than transport.

The EU is the main export market for wood from Russia, the Amazon Basin and Africa. It is believed that up to 80 percent of all Amazonian timber originates from trees that have been felled without permission.

In 2003, the European Commission issued an action plan for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT). It undertook to assess whether legislation was needed to complement voluntary agreements with wood-producing countries.

The Commission was due to formally propose such legislation in July this year, but has postponed the move until later this month. Barbara Helfferich, the institution’s environment spokeswoman, said the delay had been a result of “scheduling problems.” There have been “no major political disagreements” among officials on the content and scope of the law,” she claimed.

Sebastien Risso, a Greenpeace campaigner, said that voluntary agreements can be a “useful instrument” to help countries with valuable forest resources to manage them better. But such agreements “appear to be insufficient” on their own, making legislation necessary.

Greenpeace is urging that the legislation should place the onus on companies involved in the timber trade to prove that they only deal in wood from legal sources. Penalties should be imposed on those who do not comply with the law, it believes.

It is also seeking a standardised system that can be used to check products in order to verify that they use legal wood. That system would apply to paper and packaging, as well as to timber destined for the construction industry and for furniture and wood chips used for energy generation.

Iola Riesco from the ecological group Fern said that there have been positive moves in Ghana in recent years to give campaigners a greater say in monitoring how forestry is managed.

But she added that “it is too early to say” if the new EU-Ghana agreement “will lead to less illegal timber entering the EU’s market.”

Ralph Ridder from the European Forest Institute, which provided advice to EU officials negotiating with Ghana, said: “For many years, Europe has talked the talk of saving the world’s forests but demanded increasing volumes of cheap wood imports, providing profitable markets for illegal wood from very poor countries. Now European consumers are increasingly sensitive to global deforestation, so the EU has responded by seeking to turn around this dynamic through the VPA mechanism and today’s agreement.”