The EU FLEGT Action Plan
FLEGT stands for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade. It describes the package of measures aimed at restricting illegal logging and trade with illegally logged timber.
The European Commission presented an according EU Action Plan in May 2003. In October 2003, the Council requested the Commission to propose concrete implementation steps.Due to the illegal nature, it is obviously difficult to obtain reliable data about the true extent of the problem. The OECD assumes a worldwide volume of legal trade with timber of more than € 150 billion per year. Environmental organisations estimate that the EU alone, as one of the largest timber importers in the world, consumes illegal timber worth € 1.2 billion annually. As a result of illegal logging, the wood producing nations concerned lose out on an estimated annual revenue of € 10-15 billion worldwide, which could be spent on sustainable forest management or other measures for a sustainable development. The regions most concerned are Central and Western Africa, Southeast Asia, South America and Russia.
The FLEGT Action Plan aims to approach the problem from both the supply and the demand side. The first arm of the Action Plan aims to support the wood producing nations in strengthening their forest policy, especially by setting priorities in development cooperation. The second arm aims at establishing a licence system that should ensure that only legally produced wood can be imported into the EU.
Currently (April 2005), the Council is negotiating two dossiers:
1. a draft regulation for the establishment of a licence system;
2. the proposal for a negotiating mandate for the Commission to conclude partnership agreements with the states concerned.
The draft regulation provides for voluntary partnership agreements to be concluded with selected states in the regions concerned, in which these states undertake to issue a licence certifying that any wood that they export to the EU was logged legally.
Currently, there are still a number of reservations and disagreements with regard to this draft regulation on the part of the Member States. One open issue is the list of products to be covered by the regulation. The current proposal covers raw timber (heading 4403), railway sleepers (heading 4406), sawn timber (heading 4407), veneer (heading 4408) and plywood (heading 4412). Some states want this list to be extended to include cellulose, paper and other products, and some states want to exempt plywood.
Another sticking point is the question of certificates of origin. In order to exclude the possibility of circumventing the licence requirements via third states, the draft provides for mandatory certificates of origin for wood imports from all countries, including those not suspected of illegal logging. Due to the additional administrative burden for the timber industry associated with such certificates, Austria and some other Member States are massively against such a provision.
It is not possible to predict when agreement will be reached on this regulation. Both the current Presidency, the United Kingdom, and the preceding Presidency Luxembourg made it clear that adoption of this regulation is a major goal of their Presidency. Regardless of whether this regulation can be adopted or not in 2005, it must be assumed that the Austrian Presidency in the first half of 2006 will also have to deal with this issue, since adoption of the regulation is followed by the implementation phase.
With the negotiating mandate under discussion, the Commission is to be provided with a concrete framework for the conclusion of partnership agreements with the selected states. Because of the trade competency, the European Commission has leadership in this matter. In the implementation, however, the Commission relies on Member States that have agencies and good contacts in the countries concerned, usually in the form of development cooperation.
The concrete partner countries are Congo-Brazzaville, Ghana, Gabon, Cameroon, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Brazil and Russia. There have already been informal talks with some of these countries. Thereby, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Denmark and Finland are particularly active EU Member States.
Several Member States, including Austria, still have certain general reservations with regard to the negotiating mandate, because on the one hand the mandate cannot be defined until the scope provided by the regulation is clear, and on the other hand certain material issues still remain to be clarified. A broadly accepted, practicable definition of legality is still outstanding, for example. Social aspects are another sensitive issue, because the poorest of the poor should by no means be hit by the elimination of illegal forest use practices.
Russia plays a special role, because the Russian government has started its own FLEGT initiative involving not only the EU States, but also China, the USA and Canada. A Ministerial meeting is planned for autumn 2005 in St. Petersburg.
The World Bank and some states are supporting this initiative financially. The United Kingdom, for example, is supporting the Russian initiative with a remarkable amount because Russia has a high symbolic value that could make an impression on other countries as well.
The EU’s FLEGT Action Plan is of great interest for Austria because of the importance and international involvements of the Austrian forestry and wood industry, and has basically been supported by Austria so far, also with a view to making sure that the reproducible resource wood does not suffer any unintentional disadvantages on the market. In the course of the Austrian Forest Dialogue, which also explores the issue of Austria’s international responsibility for forest management, environmental and business representatives agree that illegal logging should have no place in the forest and timber industry. The resulting economic, ecological and social damage would be too great, as would the risks for sustainability-oriented industries. There is still considerable difference of opinion with regard to the concrete actions to be taken by Austria, however.
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02.04.2008,