Marketing Its Mark Is Fsc's Next Challenge - Forest Stewardship Council, labeling wood and wood products - Industry Overview

Home Channel News, August 6, 2001 by R. Michelle Breyer

Forest Stewardship Council has won over large U.S. dealers; suppliers are another matter

Actor Pierce Brosnan of 007 fame gazes intently out from the page of a recent issue of People magazine. "You don't have to be a special agent to protect our forests," reads the public service announcement.

All you have to do, according to the ad, is ask for the certification label of the Forest Stewardship Council when buying wood or wood products. Brosnan is the latest weapon in the FSC's increasingly aggressive campaign to win over North American consumers in its quest to become the seal of approval for green lumber.

Labeling has become an increasingly contentious and political battle. And FSC, which was formed to provide independent, third-party certification for forest lands, must work with the forest industry to certify enough acreage to meet the growing demand for this wood without sacrificing its standards and losing the support of the environmental community -- support it believes is essential to its existence.

"We can't afford to drive businesses away," said Hank Cauley, executive director of FSC in the United States. "But we don't want to reduce our standards in such a way that we lose our credibility across the balance of interests we have."

But will credibility be enough when retailers start demanding a steady supply of certified wood?

In North America, the FSC has a formidable competitor in the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, which has the backing of the American Forest & Paper Association, whose members own tens of millions of acres of North American forests.

In the United States, FSC has only 8.3 million acres certified, while SFI expects to have 105 million acres certified by year's end. Over the past several weeks, FSC has been soliciting comment on its Web site about sustainable forestry standards it is developing for nine regions in the United States, and has sent postcards to 550 "stakeholders" in those markets, including giant forest products companies like Georgia-Pacific.

"This is a classic tussle in the marketplace for the hearts and minds of producers and consumers," said Robert Hrubes, senior vp for Scientific Certification Systems, one of two auditors in the United States that certifies forest management practices to FSC's standards. "Time will tell in terms of what scheme wins out and how far FSC goes."

FSC has gained some powerful allies. Home Depot, Lowe's and Andersen Corp. are among the companies that have agreed to give preference to suppliers offering FSC-certified wood. In a recent article, Home Depot's lumber buyer John Schwager claimed that his company sells $3 million worth of FSC-certified products weekly. "Our customers ask for it," Schwager said in the June 9 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

But the Council has its share of critics from both sides of the fence. Some environmentalists have raised questions about lax standards by FSC certifiers -- charges that challenge the credibility of the FSC label.

"There is evidence of a generally lax approach on the part of most FSC-accredited certifiers to ensuring that logging operations comply with FSC's Principles and Criteria," according to a 1999 evaluation by Simon Counsell of the Rainforest Foundation, one of the founding members of FSC. "Many certificates appear to be awarded on the basis of hoped-for improvement in the management of logging operations rather than actual good quality at the time of assessment. This has resulted in certification of forestry operations with major failures of compliance with principles and criteria."

Some in the industry believe that FSC would go farther faster if it embraced the premise of mutual recognition, the practice of accepting the standards and protocols of other certification bodies. SF1, for example, last month became a full member of the Pan-European Forest Certification group and will submit its standards for review this year.

"To survive, they'll have to do something to increase their acreage," said Michael Klein, a spokesman for the American Forest & Paper Association, said of FSC. "Maybe it's a mutual recognition agreement. That doesn't mean one program has to gobble up another."

But any kind of mutual recognition is unlikely, at least in the near term, Cauley said. Mutual recognition, in his eyes, would mean reducing the FSC's standards to the "lowest common denominator" and losing the support of the powerful environmental groups that support it.

While FSC officials concede they need to significantly increase their supply of certified wood -- demand exceeds supply by at least 10 times -- they say companies like Home Depot and Lowe's are willing to be patient, Cauley said. "They're not putting much pressure on me to increase supply," Cauley said. "They'll give preference to FSC suppliers as those suppliers come on line. They want us to do it right, not undermine the label."

UP FOR A CHALLENGE

FSC is used to challenges. It got its start as an outgrowth of the 1991 United Nations Rio Earth Summit's movement to define and implement sustainable development principles and apply them to landscape conservation or forest certification. It was officially founded in October 1993. In eight years, the FSC has certified 3 percent of the world's forests. The FSC is funded by government and private donors. In March '2001, the Ford Foundation announced a $5 million grant to the international headquarters of the FSC, which plans to use the money to expand its worldwide forest certification program over the next five years.