ENVIRONMENT-CUBA: Sights on Forestry ‘Green Seal’

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Apr 19 2002 (IPS) - Cuba hopes to join the group of Latin American countries with woodlands certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which would ensure the rational exploitation and use of the Caribbean island’s forest resources and give the local economy a boost.

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), based in Oaxaca, Mexico, had certified approximately 1.8 million hectares of forest as of Oct 31, 2000, in Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama.

Juan Herrero, assistant forestry director at Cuba’s Agriculture Ministry, told IPS that this country has already begun “to lay the groundwork” for initiating FSC certification.

Also known as a “green seal”, FSC certification validates products coming from forests managed using environmentally friendly, economically viable and socially beneficial criteria.

The wood products that bear the FSC logo indicate that they meet the organisation’s strict standards and assure the consumer that the products come from sustainably managed forest.

The system entails prior inspections to evaluate various aspects of forest management and additional assessments once certification is approved, to make sure that the forest operations comply with FSC standards.

The FSC is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation founded in 1993 with the support of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF, also known as the Worldwide Fund for Nature), one of the largest independent biodiversity conservation entities.

Environmental damage is minimal if the wood is extracted in a sensible way that respects the environment, that imitates the forest’s natural dynamic, explained Steve Gretzinger, conservation director for WWF-Central America.

The WWF is promoting a campaign in that region to foment the appropriate stewardship of forests, such that the local community can reap economic benefits without causing ecological harm.

The principles and criteria of the FSC include respect for indigenous rights, compliance with national laws and international treaties ratified by the country, possession of tenure and land- use rights, and protection of biodiversity.

Furthermore, the organisation stipulates recognition of the rights of forest workers and local communities, the efficient use of products and services derived from forest to ensure economic viability and social benefits, and the existence of a documented and updated long-term plan.

To obtain certification, countries must also allow periodic monitoring and assessment of the forests, maintain “high conservation value forests” in terms of native species, and maintain their forest plantations in accordance with FSC criteria.

The green seal, among other benefits, helps producers to prevent illegal exploitation and sales of timber resources, which in many cases involve protected tree species.

The WWF cites the example of the approximately 1.5 million cubic metres of timber clandestinely exported yearly from the forests of the far eastern forests of the Russian Federation.

The country has only a small part still intact of its four million square km of forests, the equivalent of one-fifth of the world’s forested area.

Cuba, which has not exported lumber since 1946, hopes to recover the capacity for foreign sales “in the not-so-distant future,” which means inserting the island into a market that increasingly demands respect for the environment, said ministry official Herrero.

He added that, for now, the most important for the country is internal certification.

“As a state, Cuba is interested in complying with the basic principles which accredit that the forests have been managed under criteria for sustainable development,” said Herrero.

The forestry expert believes that Cuba has the conditions to require companies here – whether state-run or in partnership with foreign capital – to purchase green seal lumber if they obtain it from abroad.

The process should be introduced gradually, because there are no precedents and because the certified products tend to be more costly, but it is a way to contribute to environmental protection, said Herrero, who took part in an international seminar on forest certification this month in Havana.

The indiscriminate logging that occurred in Cuba from the 15th century to the first half of the 20th century reduced the island’s forested area to just 13.4 percent of its original coverage, he pointed out.

The government’s reforestation efforts of the last few decades have resulted in tree coverage of more than 21 percent of the 2.4 million hectares of the Cuban archipelago.

However, the programmes suffered in the 1990s from the indiscriminate exploitation of the forest resources as fuel for domestic use during the island’s petroleum shortage, which resulted from the abrupt shift in economic relations with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Cuba lost its principal supplier of crude as a result, and was forced to cut consumption from 13 million tons to six million annually in the first half of the 1990s.

Official reports from that period acknowledged that the inefficient use of the timber compromised the future of the island’s forests.

Cuban forests today hold 130 million cubic metres of exploitable lumber, and its potential for annual growth is 7.5 million, according to government figures.

Other data available indicate that Cuban tree plantation programmes entail another 50,000 hectares per year, while logging would affect fewer than 20,000 hectares annually.

The WWF, which organised the seminar on certification earlier this month in conjunction with Cuban forestry groups, has 4.7 million members worldwide and its network is active in 96 countries.