The article describes the growing consensus that the "Swedish model" of forestry is failing to protect biodiversity, and old growth forests continue to be clear-cut, including those with FSC certification. With 10 million hectares certified, or 45% of its total forest, Sweden has one of the largest areas of FSC certified logging.

But certification has failed to protect valuable wildlife habitat. As part of his report, Hoffner interviewed Daniel Rutschman of Protect the Forest and Malin Sahlin of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC). In the short video below, they explain how FSC certified companies such as SCA get round FSC's requirements not to log key areas of old growth habitats: they simply sell those areas to someone else.

SCA accounts for over two million hectares of FSC certified area in Sweden, under a certificate (opens pdf, 500kb) issued by SGS - whose certificates are already being challenged in at least three other countries.

Hoffner's article ends with a quote from Lina Bergström of FSC Sweden: "I wish we could have more backbone" she says. "But big companies make mistakes. We are not a monitoring system, we are an improving system. It's a slow process, but we're getting there."

The truth is that FSC has been issuing certificates in Sweden for well over a decade. The country's tiny remaining fragments of old growth/high conservation value forest have continued to be trashed, including by FSC certified companies. If the FSC does not actually 'monitor' all this, then what exactly does it do? FSC is not supposed to be an 'improving' system, it is supposed to be a performance-based certification system.

Quite where Lina Bergström thinks FSC is "getting" is very open to question. All the evidence seems to suggest that, far from being an 'improving system', any improvements have now stalled and are going backwards. If the FSC proves to be too slow and too easily circumvented even in a relatively well-regulated country like Sweden, it bodes very poorly for the system in other more problematic parts of the world.

Photographs taken by Erik Hoffner showing the search for old growth characteristics in Sweden's forests are available here.

As a Greenpeace blog points out about SIFORCO, "villagers were fed up with the broken promises and seized some equipment from the company in order to get them to the negotiation table. In a mission of brutal retaliation, security forces came to the loggers' assistance, raped women and girls, beat people up and destroyed property."

People sold down the river. Image courtesy of Global Witness.

A statement (opens pdf, 728Kb) issued in late October by Jose Endundo, DRC's Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation and Tourism, concerning both the events related to SODEFOR in Oshwe in January 2010 and those in the village of Yalisika in May 2011 concerning SIFORCO, will do little to reassure those who have suffered atrocities at the hands of FSC-certified logging companies. But it does at least cast some more light on the disgraceful fraud that constitutes FSC's so-called Controlled Wood Policy, and the actions of FSC's certifiers.

Minister Endundo notes about the logging concessions that "resource rights within their boundaries are geographically ill-defined and, de facto, sometimes claimed by many different rights-holders" (1). This will come as no surprise to those who have been saying for years that the arbitrary issuing by the DRC government of logging concessions over vast areas of forest that are all under claims of traditional ownership and customary use by local communities is a powder-keg waiting to explode.

If the Minister's statement has any value, it is what it says about the conditions under which SGS could have issued SIFORCO, a subsidiary of the Swiss-based Danzer group, with an FSC Controlled Wood certificate in 2010. Under FSC's Controlled Wood rules, wood from origins with any of five characteristics must be avoided, including "Wood harvested in violation of traditional and civil rights" and "Wood harvested in forests in which High Conservation Values (areas particularly worth of protection) are threatened through management activities". In order to ensure that wood can be certified as Controlled Wood, FSC's accredited certifiers are supposed to conduct a risk assessment and, according to the FSC's rules, "The results of the company's risk assessment shall be made publicly available."

So what does SGS's Risk Assessment for the issuing of an FSC Controlled Wood certificate have to say about forest tenure in an around the SIFORCO concession? This remains a mystery because, if SGS has ever conducted such an assessment, it hasn't made it public. SGS has, however, produced a Public Summary report for the certification. The problem with this report, though, is that it is such an amateurish muddle that it is surprising that the FSC Secretariat didn't suspended SGS until it was corrected and made into something intelligible.

The problems with SIFORCO have now come to the attention of the international media, with Swiss TV broadcasting a piece which investigates the issues - available below, currently only with the original German narrative.

In early November, Greenpeace published a detailed briefing setting out its concerns with SIFORCO, and simultaneously submitted a formal complaint to FSC against the whole of the Danzer Group, which also includes the FSC certified IFO logging company operating in the Republic of Congo. Greenpeace has not made the complaint publicly available, but notes in its briefing that "To ensure that FSC's reputation in the international marketplace is maintained it is clear that the FSC must not only move swiftly to disassociate from Danzer, but also provide credible commitment that no further certification in the Congo Basin is supported until the necessary preconditions for enabling credible certification are met".

In response, FSC has issued a statement acknowledging that Greenpeace has filed a complaint under FSC's 'Policy of Association'. This procedure, which provides a mechanism for FSC to dissociate itself entirely from companies which might otherwise bring it into disrepute, has only been used on one previous occasion (in relation to the highly controversial APP company in Indonesia), and if successful could result in immediate cancellation of all Danzer certificates.

Danzer has also issued a statement in response to Greenpeace's briefing.

Whilst it is to be welcomed that SIFORCO and Danzer's certificates are being challanged, what should not be overlooked is that, what is at stake here is not really whether a particular logging company behaved in a totally unacceptable way or made mistakes - that is the least one would expect from most logging companies in the Congo Basin. The issue as far as forest certification and wider forest policy is concerned, is how such a company could have come to be certified in the first place?

The complaint against Danzer/SIFORCO is more than just another grievance against yet another certificate that should never have been issued. It is a warning that SGS's certification system as a whole simply cannot be trusted. Arguably, it is FSC's 'association' with SIFORCO's certifier, SGS, that most serves to undermine FSC's reputation, and it is from them that FSC should dissociate itself. Typically, though, and reflecting as ever the stranglehold that the certifiers have over the FSC's policies, the Policy of Association rules cannot be used to break the FSC's ties with any of its accredited certifiers, only with the companies they have erroneously certified. Until the FSC empowers itself to completely cut ties with certifiers whenever necessary, it will find itself constantly being associated with companies that bring it into disrepute.

The complaint against Danzer is also the latest signal that the FSC process is seriously ill-adapted to the conditions of the Congo Basin, and is probably unusable there. According to FSC-Watch's calculations, the complaint means that the area under FSC certification in the Congo Basin which has been cancelled, suspended or formally challenged is now greater than the certified area which is, as yet, formally uncontested. What is stake is whether the whole model of 'sustainable forest management' (i.e, industrial logging) in the Congo Basin is a failed paradigm, and something which the FSC should have nothing more to do with.

(1) In the original French, "des droits sur les ressources mal définis dans leurs limites géographique et, de facto, parfois revendiques par plusieurs ayants-droits différents"

In response to the concerns raised in the piece, IKEA told Plus-minus that "we are taking these charges seriously and investigating them in-depth with the help of external FSC certifiers". FSC-Watch is not quite sure what that means, given that the FSC appears to have given up any pretence of carrying out proper investigations of alleged breaches of the Principles and Criteria or other failings by the certifiers - and instead is asking the certifiers to investigate themselves. It will come as no surprise to regular FSC-Watch readers to know that Swedwood's clear-cutting of old-growth forest was certified by the Rainforest Alliance SmartWood. A person identified in the documentary as the certifier responsible for the Swedwood certificate declines to be interviewed.

The full piece, with English sub-titles specially prepared for FSC-Watch by Pro-Regenwald is here:

Taking us on a tour of some of the South African landscapes devastated by industrial plantations, the video explains how FSC's Principle 10 is inadequate to ensure that certified plantations are not responsible for destruction of non-forest ecosystem, such as grasslands, even if these are more biodiverse than local forests. It shows how these plantations are also in contravention of FSC Principles 5,6, 9 and 10.

Whilst the film concentrates on South Africa, what it documents also applies to many other certified plantations around the world. FSC's flawed policies on the certification of plantations, and its inability to ensure that its accredited certifiers are respecting the Principles and Criteria, are now causing active campaigning against the FSC system. FSC should realise that it's time for fundamental reform.

As we reported a week ago an investigation by Oxfam has revealed that the FSC-certified New Forests Company in Uganda has been responsible for eviction of 22,500 people from their land. In addition to the video news piece about Oxfam's report produced by the Guardian, Al Jazeera TV also reported on the evictions, including interviews with Kate Geary of Oxfam and Robert Devereux, the Chairman of New Forests Company.

In a response to the report, issued on October 24th, the FSC Secretariat has stated that "FSC takes the findings of the Oxfam report very seriously...FSC has filed an official complaint with SGS Qualifor in order to ensure that any allegations about contradictions with FSC's Principles and Criteria - particularly with regards to violent evictions and unresolved land claims - are investigated with the utmost rigor".

FSC asking SGS to investigate itself? That is the job of the Accreditation Services International (ASI), the former part of the FSC Secretariat that was spun out to become an independent organisation some years ago, and which has the responsiblity to independently verify that the certification companies accredited to the FSC (and other certification schemes, including the Marine Stewardship Council) are fulfilling the responsibilities and requirements set out for them by the FSC.

FSC-Watch wonders just what is going on here.

Perhaps the FSC no longer trusts the ASI to carry out proper assessments of whether the certifiers have broken the rules or not? It has good reason not to.

As we reported previously, ASI carried out an assessment of SGS's certification of New Forests Company in 2010, finding little wrong. ASI's report (opens pdf, 133Kb) noted that "The SGS Qualifor audit team conducted a professional and systematic surveillance audit. ASI audit team is satisfied that the CARs raised by SGS Qualifor during this audit address most of the nonconformity identified". The ASI accreditation inspection of SGS resulted in the issuing of only three minor technical 'Corrective Action Requests' against SGS, and one 'Observation'.

ASI failed to spot that SGS had failed to spot that NFC had evicted over 20,000 people from the land - despite the evictions having been the subject of a high court injunction

By issuing a 'complaint' against SGS (the wording of which has not been made public), FSC is basically admitting that ASI has not been doing its job properly. Because the FSC system as a whole relies on the certification companies to comply properly with the FSC's requirements, the failure of ASI means that the system as a whole has failed. FSC might as well have issued a complaint against itself.

It only goes to show what chaos the FSC system is now in, that it is powerless to do anything directly to uphold the certification standards that its accredited certifiers are supposed to operate to. Under any sensible certification system, if the accreditation body (i.e, in this case FSC) were to find fault with a certifier, then that certifier could be struck off the list of accredited certifiers (as SGS should have been long ago).

Or there is another explanation. Perhaps the FSC Secretariat realises that, whatever it might find (yet again) about how SGS's so-called certification system has failed all reasonable standards, nothing meaningful will result anyway, bearing in mind the stranglehold that the big certification companies have over the FSC. So FSC or ASI might as well save themselves the embarrassment of carrying out an investigation, finding fault and then doing nothing - and instead just let SGS carry out the investigation themselves, find nothing wrong and do nothing as a result.

This is much easier for all concerned, and means that everyone can quickly get back to the job of getting paid to issue certificates to companies that do not deserve them (and in some cases taking valuable 'gifts' from them at the same time), and pretending that all is well and good with the structure of the FSC system.

Organisations such as Oxfam, Greenpeace and even perhaps WWF will no doubt be wondering just how much worse things will get before they are forced to confront the fact that their membership of the FSC is helping to prop up an organisation that seems to have lost all control over its core purpose, and is now nothing but a constant embarrassment.