FSC's website explains that FSC owns three registered trademarks:

*the initials "FSC®"; *the name "Forest Stewardship Council®"; *the "checkmark-and-tree" logo

And FSC takes protecting its trademarks "very seriously":

FSC trademarks may only be used by organizations or individuals that have obtained authorization, and use must be in compliance with FSC’s trademark standards and guidelines.

The FSC trademarks are the intellectual property of the FSC and we take their protection and enforcement very seriously.

Obviously, FSC doesn't really mean to prevent journalists from writing about FSC. Or does it? The point of the trademarks is surely to prevent companies from misusing FSC to promote their products. Or is it? FSC lists six categories that may want to use FSC trademarks. Media is covered in two categories: Non-Certificate Holders; and Media.

FSC's website on non-certificate holders explains that,

Non-certificate holders include commercial and non-commercial organizations, educational and research institutions, the media, and FSC accredited certification bodies and their partners. [emphasis added]

And,

In order to use the FSC trademarks for general or product promotion, the individual or organization needs to sign an FSC trademark license agreement; representatives of the media, educational institutions or research organizations must sign an acknowledgement of receipt of the logo files.

Meanwhile, FSC's website on media explains that,

Members of the media who want to use the FSC trademarks in publications, in order to inform the public about FSC certification and who do not make commercial claims related to FSC, do not need any form of certification.

And,

The FSC National Office in your country can work directly with you to provide advice and logo files. If you wish to use the FSC trademarks you need to sign an acknowledgement of receipt of logo files.

Confusing isn't it? Here's Timber + Design International's article on the subject:

WHATEVER YOU DO DON'T MENTION THE FSC

According to Wikipedia, 'censorship' is the suppression of speech or other public communication, which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body.

And a recent experience suggests that is what the Australian branch of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is trying to impose.

When we invited FSC Australia to answer a series of questions in response to the contention that forest certification is a huge success – but it is in the wrong neck of the woods? chief executive Natalie Reynolds pulled out the big stick.

Apart from declining to participate because the "fundamental title of the article [never a title, just a point of reference] is negative", she warned that "anything you write about FSC, if you use the trademarks which are the letters 'FSC', words 'Forest Stewardship Council' and the checkmark and tree logo ... you must seek approval so we can check accuracy of the text in accordance with the process described here [reference to a website]".

Do the people at FSC seriously believe they can manipulate free speech and stifle public comment in that way? Imagine if Qantas, McDonalds or the Catholic Church tried to pull the same stroke! Surely the intention of the policy is to curtail unauthorised use of the FSC brand in a marketing sense. If not, it is arrogant and unacceptable in the modern age.

Contrast that with the reaction to the same questions (and 'title') from the more media-savvy and altogether friendlier people at PEFC International – the world’s biggest forest certification organisation. Their communications boss Thorsten Arndt responded in full and placed no conditions on how we used the information. (PEFC endorses the Australian Forestry Standard, which certifies the sustainability of some 10 million ha of the country’s hardwood and planted forest. By contrast, FSC certifies less than 1000 ha in Australia.)

Censorship attempts notwithstanding, we take a closer look at the cost/benefits of forest certification and chain-of-custody in the September issue.

By Tony Neilson – editor

"Green Diamond Resource Company has undergone a lengthy and rigorous assessment of its forest management practices, broadly defined, and have demonstrated a level of conformance to the FSC Standard that merits award of certification."

EPIC (Environmental Protection Information Center) disagrees with SCS's assessment. "The award of FSC certification to Green Diamond has very serious implications for the future of the Redwood Temperate Rainforest, and suggests an unraveling of credible forest management certification processes," EPIC writes in a reaction to the certification on its website.

In June 2012, EPIC put out an Action Alert in which they pointed out that many questions arise over the FSC certification. EPIC lists the following problems:

"Green Diamond's aggressive clearcut logging, their legacy of toxic pollution, their decades long history of antagonistic relationships with local communities and civil society organizations, and their corporate culture of greenwash, impunity, and lack of accountability."

The Action Alert came two days after a public meeting about the certification. At the time, EPIC believed that the certification process provided a "real opportunity" to bring about "substantial changes in the manner in which Green Diamond (ex-Simpson Timber) treats public trust resources in our bioregion." However, after taking part in the public meeting, EPIC was concerned that,

"FSC is not registering nor taking seriously the comments of the public," and noted that "there is a very real risk that the Forest Stewardship Council could provide certification to Green Diamond without bringing about the necessary transformation of their operations on the ground."

When SCS published the public report of their audit, EPIC found that they had failed to disclose "a significant amount of information about the process, information which at this juncture remains secret". EPIC is demanding that the full certification record is made public. EPIC comments that,

The general weakening of FSC standards, and the deterioration of meaningful access and participation for local communities in the FSC certification process, are widespread criticisms of FSC at a regional and global scale. What is particularly troubling is that such a mistake could have been made in the Redwood Temperate Rainforest of northern California.

EPIC is working on an investigation into the certification of Green Diamond. EPIC's initial review is available on their website and below:

Climate Ignorance
In the year 2013 FSC still fails to take the climate crisis and the essential role of the world's forests in sequestering atmospheric carbon into account. This is particularly egregious when considering the Redwood Temperate Rainforest Ecosystem enormous potential for capturing carbon and sequestering for thousands of years is unparalleled. By certifying clearcuts in the redwood forests, FSC is squandering an opportunity to encourage forest management that will assist our society in responding to the present climate crisis.

Endangered Species
By Green Diamond's own admission, the so- called Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for the Northern Spotted Owl has clearly failed the species. The HCP has allowed the company to continue to destroy owl habitat, resulting in an undeniable decline in the number of owl nesting sites on Green Diamond property. Nevertheless, FSC relies on this failed Green Diamond HCP as evidence of the company's responsible forest management.

Toxic Legacy
Green Diamond has made a commitment to eliminate the use of atrazine, the pesticide likely to be banned nationally in the near future due to well-documented public health hazards. However, in addition to thousands of pounds of atrazine used by Green Diamond on their property in the past, the company will continue to use many thousands of pounds of other harmful pesticides, such as 2, 4-D, imazpyr, and triclopyr. These substances threaten aquatic species and domestic water supplies, including the Mad River which provides municipal drinking water to tens of thousands of people. In a 2011 Biological Opinion, the National Marine Fisheries Services has concluded that the use of 2,4-D jeopardizes the continued existence of Pacific Coast salmonids.

Community Conflicts
The award of FSC certification comes at a time of heightened local community conflicts over Green Diamond logging. This includes the controversial plans to clearcut at Strawberry Rock near the town of Trinidad, and their proposal to clearcut in the immediate vicinity of the Headwaters Forest Reserve, further exacerbating conflicts with local residents threatened with flooding downstream from Green Diamond holdings on the Elk River.

Transparency and Accountability
In reviewing the public report questions have been raised as to how community concerns and comments were integrated and weighted in the audit process. EPIC will demand access to the full record on deliberations that led to FSC certification for Green Diamond. Guaranteeing full and open access to information is a key tenant of environmental democracy and EPIC will continue to defend this fundamental right.

In 2010, two Belgian journalists, Leopold Broers and An-Katrien Lecluyse, spent three months investigating the impact of Veracel's monoculture eucalyptus plantations on local communities. They made a documentary, titled, "Sustainable on Paper", based on interviews carried out in Bahia and Belgium:

Broers and Lecluyse listened not only to the company's point of view, but spent time finding out what local communities think about the project. José Fragoso is leader of the Pataxó community Tiba. The journalists asked him whether Veracel deserves the FSC certificate. "I don't think so," he replied. "The label is only intended to deceive people who don't know about this."

The deception is well illustrated by Sergio Alpio, Veracel's CEO. In 2007, nearly 350 organisations signed a letter to the Forest Stewardship Council, titled, "Arguments to show that Veracel should not receive certification”. Many of the organisations that signed the letter are from Brazil. Nevertheless, in the film Alipio states that, "In one year and a half, Veracel got eight inspection visits for the certification, although normally it should have been two. There were eight inspections, because a couple of international NGOs had doubts."

Broers and Lecluyse wrote an article based on their research in MO* magazine. FSC's response is extremely revealing. FSC has posted six "stakeholder updates" about Veracel on its website:

• 25 September 2010: FSC acknowledges that, "FSC now has information about the current stakeholder concerns regarding Veracel’s plantations." Perhaps FSC lost the 2007 letter signed by nearly 350 organisations. Maybe search engines are banned in the FSC headquarters in the interests of keeping staff focussed on the work in hand.

• 5 November 2010: FSC states that, "ASI [Accreditation Services International] will conduct a comprehensive witness assessment of SGS Qualifor at Veracel in Brazil in early December." Note that SGS Qualifor is to be assessed and not Veracel. ASI visited Veracel in March 2008. SGS Qualifor issued the certification days before ASI arrived. "In a devastating report, the ASI inspection team crushes the work of SGS Qualifor," write Broers and Lecluyse. "The report reveals that ASI would not have granted the label." But only SGS Qualifor can withdraw the certificate, not ASI.

• 15 December 2010: According to FSC, "Preliminary findings from the ASI assessment of SGS Brazil on 6 – 10 December are currently being analyzed." The results of the ASI assessment, "do not have immediate implications for the Certificate Holder".

• 26 January 2011: ASI's report, "reveals 8 Major Corrective Action Requests (CARs), 5 Minor CARs and 2 Observations of non-conformities of SGS Qualifor in their audit of Veracel, relating to issues such as the use of chemicals, health and safety of workers, national, local and international laws, stakeholder consultation, identifi-cation of High Conservation Value forests, and other requirements as outlined in the Report. The lead assessor for ASI has therefore recommended suspension of SGS Qualifor program for FSC Forest Management Brazil." SGS Qualifor has until 10 March 2011 to close the Major CARs. Veracel, however, needs to do nothing. "The ASI findings do not determine whether the Certificate Holder is in compliance," FSC tells us in its "stakeholder update".

• 25 March 2011: SGS "is not allowed to perform new FSC certification evaluations or issue/re-issue new FSC certificates in Brazil until the suspension has been lifted." ASI will go back to Veracel in April 2011 "to complete the dispute resolution process". Veracel's certificate remains valid.

• 3 November 2011: ASI's visit in April 2011, raised three new "major non conformities against SGS Qualifor".

In other words, ASI found that SGS Qualifor did not conduct the certification process of Veracel in accordance with FSC's rules. FSC suspended SGS Qualifor, but only in Brazil. The fact that SGS Qualifor did not carry out a proper assessment of Veracel does not affect Veracel's certificate in any way whatsoever.

Veracel has now hired Rainforest Alliance/SmartWood to help it continue its deception. In April 2012, Rainforest Alliance/SmartWood announced that Imaflora (which represents Rainforest Alliance in Brazil) would be carrying out a pre-assessment of Veracel in May-June 2012. FSC maintains a searchable database of its certificates here: info.fsc.org. Here's the result of a search for Veracel:

Veracel remains certified, despite three visits from ASI. The Certifying Body has changed from SGS Qualifor to Rainforest Alliance/SmartWood. This is now a "closed dispute", according to FSC.

Under the FSC's current rules, areas of natural forest that have been cut down and converted into industrial tree plantations later than 1994 cannot be FSC certified. This important 'safeguard' has been a source of annoyance to the plantation industry (which has been strongly represented on the Board of FSC), as well as large scale pulp and paper companies, which would like to see the restriction removed - in such a way that, in effect, wood from almost any plantation anywhere in the world could be FSC certified, regardless of whether it had been the cause of large-scale or recent deforestation. The FSC's accredited certification companies, whose interests now largely determine FSC policy, would also be in favour of such a weakening of the rules because it would open up new and lucrative markets for their services.

A very long-running 'multi-stakeholder consultation' on FSC's 'Principle 10' concerning plantations failed to find a consensus - but the pressure to drop the '1994 rule' has continued to mount.

A new proposal from the FSC Secretariat circulated this month (see below), suggests a novel way of circumventing the rules to protect natural forest from being converted to plantation: where plantation owners have both pre-1994 plantations (which are certifiable) and post-1994 plantations or areas of natural forest which they wish to convert to plantations (which are not), the area could be split into separate units, with the pre-1994 units being FSC certified under the usual assessment procedures, but the 'non-certifiable' parts being instead certified under the Controlled Wood procedures (ie, no actual on-the-ground assessment against the FSC's Principles and Criteria).

Also under the proposal, fully FSC-certified wood would be allowed from certain plantations where there is still deforestation and conversion going on, up to a limit of 5% of the certified area. This would allow plantation companies to finally destroy any remnants of natural forest remaining in their holdings. Such remnants can be incredibly valuable ecologically, as natural forest corridors and reservoirs of biodiversity.

These changes would mean that the all of the plantation company's produce, even from areas of natural forest currently being chopped down and turned into fastwood industrial tree crops, would be marketable as either 'FSC Certified' or 'FSC Controlled Wood'. Though it does not go so far as stating it explicitly, the proposal is in effect an invitation to allow the 'laundering' of wood from deforestation and conversion into the FSC certified supply chain.

As FSC-Watch has repeatedly noted, the Controlled (sic) Wood policy has, in practice, been used to allow wood from all kinds of sources (including where there are egregious abuses of local people's rights) into the FSC-certified supply chains. Moreover, in practice, the assessment of plantations for certification has often been so lenient that, in cases such as Veracel in Brazil, the certified operations bear very little resemblance to the FSC's Principles and Criteria. But what FSC-Watch finds surprising about this new proposal is that it will self-evidently lead to the further degradation of FSC's already crumbling credibility: the Secretariat seems not to realise that accepting the tainting of the FSC certified supply chain with wood from outright deforestation will be the system's death-knell. Bizarrely, in an indication of how utterly confused the FSC now seems to be in its policy thinking, the proposal notes as a "problem" that some companies have been forced to stop converting natural forest into plantation in order to stay FSC certified - ie, they are doing precisely what the FSC's rules on plantations were originally set up to achieve!

FSC-Watch says, environmental and social chamber members of FSC beware! You are supporting an organisation that now seems to serve only one purpose: advancing the interests of the timber industry.

From: FSC Membership Services Date: Thu, May 10, 2012 at 3:30 PM Subject: [FSC] Public consultation of the Advice on splitting FMUs

TO: FSC Members FSC Board of Directors FSC Regional Offices FSC National Offices FSC accredited Certification Bodies Accreditation Services International FSC Senior Management Team

FROM: FSC Policy and Standards Unit

Dear all,

FSC invites stakeholder comments on the draft Advice on splitting FMUs for the certification of Forest Management Units (FMUs) with areas converted from natural forest to plantations after 1994.

This Advice was requested by the FSC Board of Directors and is based on stakeholder requests to provide a potential solution for the following scenario:

PROBLEM: In many parts of the world, Organizations are constrained from entering their FMU(s) into FSC certification because of Criterion 10.9 of FSC-STD-01-001 V4-0, which forbids the FSC certification of "plantations established in areas converted from natural forests after November 1994".

There are situations where a single FMU contains both natural forests and plantations in several separate blocks, divisions or subdivisions of the FMU, including areas converted from natural forests before and after 1994. Some Organizations in this situation, wishing to obtain FSC Forest Management certification for the eligible areas, have stopped all conversion of natural forests, and are managing all areas according to a similar set of FSC-compatible guidelines.

PROPOESD SOLUTION: In these situations where the 1994 rule makes it impossible for the Organization to comply fully with the FSC Principles and Criteria in the plantation areas, the Advice proposes the option to split the existing FMU into two or more separate new FMUs, each one eligible for either FSC Forest Management certification or FSC Controlled Wood certification.

The draft Advice and a comment form for your feedback are enclosed to this communication. The deadline for submitting comments is 10 June 2012. Please direct any comments to me. In the case of questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thank you in advance for your support and feedback.

Best regards,

Achim

Hans Joachim Droste, Ph.D. Policy and Standards Director FSC International Center GmbH

The full FSC 'Advice Note' on this subject is available here: ADV2000715Draft10.pdf

As we have previously reported, the complaint against SODEFOR's certificate dates back to April 2011, but by the time Greenpeace had lodged their appeal, the certificate had already been withdrawn by the certifier, Rainforest Alliance SmartWood. Because of this, the Complaints Panel, consisting of three independent experts convened by the FSC to look into the allegations, rejected Greenpeace's argument that the the certificate damaged the reputation of the FSC and that the organisation should invoke its 'Policy of Association' by immediately cancelling the certificate and formally dis-associating itself from SODEFOR.

However, the Panel's other findings and recommendations on the case go to the very heart of some of the FSC's problems and its disintegrating credibility.

The report of the Panel finds that there appear to have been gross errors in the way that SmartWood conducted its original certification assessment of SODEFOR back in 2010. The logging company was seeking to obtain 'Controlled Wood' certification, an essentially 'self-certification' process whereby documentation and paper commitments provided by the company play a key role in the external assessment. Amongst these are a requirement that the company has proper written policies preventing it from harvesting or trading in illegal wood, that it doesn't abuse peoples' rights, and that it doesn't exploit wood from areas of high conservation value forests. Despite the ease with which these should have been checked by SmartWood, the Panel could find no evidence that SODEFOR possessed such documents, and "we therefore assume they don't exist and hence, the company should not have been given a certificate."

Neither did the company have any written procedures for its workers as to how it needed to behave to qualify for the FSC's Controlled Wood standard, and nor did it provide any training in how to do so. The Panel concluded that "Considering the existing conflicts in the area, this is a serious omission that should have been pointed out by SmartWood". The Panel also pointed out that one member of the SmartWood mission to assess SODEFOR was also a member of the government's forest control administration and that "it is difficult to see how his double mandate would not rapidly lead to major conflicts of interests." Concerning the quality of SmartWood's work in the Congo, the Panel concludes, "The audit report by Smartwood does not show any real understanding of the complications of the Congo Basin".

As a result of all these failings, the Panel "recommends to suspend SmartWood from further operations in DRC and asks the FSC Board to investigate SmartWood practices in other Congo Basin countries (or other ares with bad forest governance) to ensure it meets FSC standards. This type of certificates only undermines the FSC."

As important as this recognition is of the damage that SmartWood specifically is doing to FSC's reputation, the Panel report goes even further into the structural reasons why such problems continue to occur, despite many years of warnings (from FSC-Watch among others). The report notes in conclusion that "FSC seems to be too dependent on the quality (or lack thereof) of the due diligence process of certification bodies. The panel therefore urges to re-assess how FSC can better control these CBs so they don't continue to certify the 'uncertifiable' in line with recommendations put to FSC by a number of NGOS and timber traders in October 2008."

In its response to the Complaints Panel report, the international Board of the FSC has clearly accepted the Panel's recommendation that the FSC should not 'dis-associate' itself from SODEFOR. But on the other more important recommendations - that SmartWood should be prohibited from issuing any more certificates in the Congo Basin region, and that the FSC needs to better control the certifiers more generally - the Board remains totally silent.

It seems that FSC's new complaints process, ushered in only last year, will do little to overcome the certifiers' stranglehold on the organisation. More 'certifications of the uncertifiable' are bound to follow, as will NGO resignations from the FSC's membership.