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The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) was established in 1993 as an international non-governmental organisation with the objective of saving our forests through environmentally compatible and sustainable forest management. The FSC created a world-wide label certifying wood products from suitably managed forests. The FSC label is awarded to all sorts of wood products, such as furniture, timber and paper products, and in many tropical countries also to many other forest products such as nuts, honey, rubber and mushrooms. Currently, according to the FSC's German working group, about 280 million acres of forest in nearly 80 countries world-wide have been certified as complying with FSC regulations.
The FSC has set up its own system for certifying sustainable forest management. The criteria for sustainable management of forests are intended to avoid uncontrolled logging, violation of human rights and pollution of the environment. A wood product will only be awarded the FSC label, if during production it can be ensured that a specified percentage of FSC-certified raw materials were used. Each company processing wood from a FSC forest must also be FSC certified. This safeguards monitoring of the production chain from forest to product. In the context of certification, ingoing and outgoing goods and production processes are assessed by independent third parties once per year. There are over 9 000 Chain-of-Custody certificates. These certificates prove that all stages in the manufacture of a product carrying the FSC label were individually certified.
One major challenge for the FSC is making sure that virgin forests are sustainably managed, particularly in tropical countries, such as South East Asia, Central Africa and Latin America, where there is often a great deal of illegal logging. However, a study presented by the American environmental organisation, Rainforest Alliance, stated that in Guatemala, FSC certification is a more effective way of protecting tropical rain forests than mere protective legislation for the rain forest.
It is very difficult indeed to monitor all illegal activities in almost inaccessible forests. So, some FSC members and supporters have established observer groups to monitor FSC activities, because they were concerned that the FSC might lose credibility and because they were unhappy with some certifications in Thailand, Laos, Brazil, the USA, New Zealand, South Africa and Uganda.
One way of avoiding the tropical forest issue altogether is to buy locally grown timber. But the FSC label does not show the origin of the certified timber. At best, you can get a rough idea of the area of origin. The best approach is to ask producers where they source their timber.
