Policy recommendations

  • The European Commission should adopt legislation which requires that only legally-harvested timber and timber products coming from legal sources and responsibly-managed forests be placed on the European market. Legislation should be cost-effective, fair and enforceable and should include sanctions. The primary responsibility for proving legality should rest with all companies that are importing or selling products in the EU, thus creating a level playing field and being WTO-compatible.
  • The European Commission should strengthen the FLEGT-process of supporting wood producing countries to improve forest law enforcement, tackle corruption and promote socially and environmentally responsible forest management.
  • The EU should enlarge the number of Voluntary Partnership Agreements with producing countries. A participatory multi-stakeholder process, including local communities and indigenous peoples, should be at the core of these VPAs.
  • The EU should broaden the range of products covered by VPAs to cover all timber products. 
  • The EU Member States should speed up the implementation of sustainable public procurement for wood products including social and environmental criteria. 
  • The European Commission should endeavour to bring best practices in EU countries together and give clear guidance to Member States on how they can implement sustainable procurement by developing guidelines and tools to include social and environmental criteria in public procurement.

Case: Illegal Logging

05-02-2008 MEP Frithjof Schmidt calls for better Policy Coherence for Development on fisheries and illegal logging

05 February 2008

In his report “Policy Coherence for Development and the effects of the EU’s exploitation of certain biological and natural resources on development in West Africa”, MEP Schmidt (Greens/ALE) points out several examples of incoherent policy outcomes in the fields of fisheries and illegal logging in the western African region, and asks the European Union to take its responsibility by re-examining its role in the region.
In a motion for a parliament resolution MEP Schmidt depicts the detrimental influence of the EU on sustainable development in West Africa, particularly in these two policy areas.  

Fisheries

Fish is the most important natural resource for West Africa. Food security, nutrition and employment in several West-African countries depend largely on fisheries. Since 2003, the EU has access to these countries’ surpus fish stocks via the Fisheries Partnership Agreements (FPAs), that have replaced the original fisheries agreements. The latter were heavily criticized for their lack of sustainability and negative impact on the development of local fisheries. Under the old agreements EU vessels got access to resources of mostly developing countries in exchange of a financial compensation to their governments. As a consequence European vessels had a terrible effect on fish stocks in ACP countries. By replacing these access agreements by FPAs, the EU aimed at improving the level of sustainability of its fisheries activities. These FPAs, on paper at least, take development issues into account. However, the problem of overfishing has as of yet not been tackled effectively by these partnership agreements, since reliable and independent scientific data on the status of fish stocks is often lacking.

In his resolution, MEP Schmidt calls on the EU to support West African research capacities and to create long-term programmes to identify the relationship between the fish stocks and a balanced ecosystem. The resolution also calls on the Community to “decouple the level of payment for agreements from the level of fishing opportunities that are granted in return”, because this will encourage the partner country to limit European vessels’ access when stocks decline. This measure will be necessary to be able to grant priority access to local fishermen and industries, whose economy, after all, depends largely on their catches.

Timber

Another issue concerning an important natural resource for West Africa is the ongoing logging and trading of illegal timber. The European Union is a major consumer of illegally logged timber. Illegal logging is a widespread activity in timber-producing countries where governance is weak and corruption flourishes. Illegally logged timber is imported into the EU at low prices. The EU showed its commitment – once again on paper - to tackling this serious problem by adopting the Forest Law Enforcement Action Plan (FLEGT, 2003). However, in practice, no large improvements have been made and FLEGT has not been implemented by all member states.

MEP Schmidt’s resolution stresses the need for action on this important issue for West African governments and Europe - since tropical deforestation is responsible for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore the resolution calls on the Commission to propose a comprehensive legislative proposal that prevents the placing of illegal timber and timber products. It also asks the Commission and EU Member States to speed up the implementation of the EU action plan FLEGT.

The EU Coherence Programme monitors the efforts made by MEPs to address Policy Coherence for Development in their daily work. Schmidt’s own initiative report and the motion for a parliament resolution are very welcome acts in this respect, as they demonstrate clearly how incoherent practices impact negatively on developing countries. These efforts do not pass by unnoticed: MEP Schmidt is awarded a coherence-star on our website.

Click here to read our case study on the ‘Fisheries Partnership Agreements’
Click here to read our case study on ‘Illegal logging’

Visit the website of MEP Frithjof Schmidt