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

22-04-2008 MEPs in action against deforestation and illegal logging

22 April 2008

A Group of 37 MEPs representing political groups such as Verts-ALE, ALDE, PPE-DE, PSE and GUE-NGL has written a joint letter to the Commission in which it urges the Commission to produce effective measures to prevent deforestation and illegal logging.

Illegal logging and global trade in illegal timber are widely recognized as key threats to forests, biodiversity and development worldwide. The EU is a major world consumer of illegally logged timber and therefore plays a key role in the protection of biodiversity and the fight against illegal logging.

As one of the initiators of the letter MEP Kathalijne Buitenweg (Verts-ALE) commented in an article on the joint initiative. Last month, the Brazilian government announced that deforestation in the Amazon region, the ‘lungs of the world’ is increasing again. According to MEP Buitenweg by 2030 more than half of the tropical rainforest in this region will have disappeared if the current process of deforestation proceeds. A catastrophe for both humans and nature.

She states that the current EU policy on this matter is too informal and is mainly based on voluntarily actions made by wood manufacturers and traders. MEP Buitenweg and the other 36 MEPS therefore urge the Commission to propose new bills before this summer to combat the sale of illegal wood in Europe.

According to the EU Coherence Programme the EU, in its approach to the problem of illegal logging, is not taking the necessary measures to meet its aim of halting the loss in biodiversity, stopping deforestation and fighting illegal logging. This undermines EU environmental objectives as well as development-cooperation investments to fight poverty in the context of sustainable development. 

In its case study on illegal logging the EU Coherence Programme suggests that 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 allowed 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.

At the same time we advise the EU Member States should speed up the implementation of sustainable public procurement for wood products including social and environmental criteria. 

The EU Coherence Programme monitors the efforts made by MEPs to enhance Policy Coherence for Development in their daily work. The MEPs questions to the Commission highlight the interests of developing countries in the policy field of illegal logging and deforestation. By doing so, the MEPs hold the Commission to its commitments in terms of policy coherence for development. For this action, all political groups presented by the 37 MEPs participating were awarded a coherence star.

The letter ‘EU Action against deforestation and illegal logging’ can be found here.

 

More information?

Visit the website of MEP Kathalijne Buitenweg

Click here to read the article (in Dutch)