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

09-11-2010 EU to prohibit trade in illegal timber by 2013

Trade in illegal harvested timber will be prohibited in the EU from 2013 onwards. Member States are going to be obliged to trace and prosecute offenders. On October 11th the Member States approved the legislative act, after the European Parliament (EP) had already given its consent.

The EP already approved a proposal to prohibit the trade in illegal timber from 2012 onwards, this summer. Yet, the European ministers of agriculture were at that time unwilling to commit legal penalties to this crime.

The legislative act is good news for countries that signed a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) with the EU, like Ghana. Due to this new law, trade in legal timber will not be undermined by cheap illegal timber entering the markets.

Nevertheless implementing this legislative act in a effective manner will be a great challenge, as the value chains and thus the route of timber before it enters the European market is often not very transparent, it will be hard to find out whether the timber was actually logged legally.    

Click here for the legislative act.