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FOREST CERTIFICATION AND SMALL FOREST ENTERPRISES: KEY TRENDS, BENEFITS AND IMPACTS

By Rebecca Butterfield

Over the past decade, small forest enterprises (SFEs), including smallholders and non-industrial private forest owners, have participated in forest certification through forest management certificates and as part of a certified chain of custody supply to a larger processing enterprise. SFEs are those that harvest or process a small volume of timber, either due to small holding sizes or to low productivity of forest operations. This review looked at the experience of SFE certification in a global context, highlighting their role, region by region, in terms of land area and wood supply. The certification of smallholders has been concentrated geographically, with large numbers of European smallholders becoming certified under the PEFC system, non-industrial forest owners in the United States under the FSC or SFI (through the US Tree Farm programme) systems, community or group certification in Mesoamerica, and outgrower schemes in South Africa and other pulp-producing plantation regions. Three certification systems were reviewed in relation to the barriers SFEs face and the benefits they can attain under each.

Forest certification is a market-based tool that is not effective or appropriate in all circumstances. Ensuring equitable access to forest certification and certified product markets for smallholders requires targeting a distinct set of issues which are not easily addressed or resolved. While equity is a stated objective of the FSC and other forest certification systems, the nature and scale of SFEs creates a number of barriers that need to be resolved for benefits to accrue and for this be a viable option.

The experience of SFE certification raises a number of issues:

• Will SFEs continue to become certified under existing systems?
• Which systems offer lowest barriers to access and which offer greatest potential benefits?
• Does certification create inequalities in access to wood markets for SFEs beyond usual constraints and barriers?
• Does it help or hinder market access?
• Should more be done to extend or adapt certification for SFEs?
• Should tools, other than certification, be used for SFEs to achieve SFM?

Barriers
Community forestry operations oriented towards subsistence use or local markets and small volumes of wood are simply not viable commercial operations and are unable to afford the costs of third party certification (even with greatly reduced certification costs). Similarly, many of the very small forest owners who originally signed on for forest certification early on have now dropped out as their small holdings (50-100 ha) and infrequent harvests cannot justify third party audits costs nor do they attract wood buyers (due to small, infrequent harvests) who might want certified wood. Some landowners are clearly not interested in being part of a group. This group comprises the largest drop-out rate in the Smartwood portfolio, a certifying body that has invested considerable resources and placed considerable emphasis on the equitable inclusion of communities and other SFEs.

The barriers that SFEs face are caused by their low productivity and low timber output, lack of market access due to location and productivity, lack of technical expertise, limited adoption of business and documentation standards that are common at larger scales and difficulties in incorporating landscape-wide environmental concerns into the certification of small timber-producing areas - wildlife values, aesthetics, recreation, suburban pressures and ecological integrity.

Adjustments
A number of adjustments have been made recently to the FSC forest certification system designed to eliminate barriers for SFEs and these adjustments have been analysed from the perspective of access and cost-benefits.

The FSC system has introduced a group certification option and approved a set of modified standards for small and low-intensity operations (SLIMFs). FSC is in the process of refining the criteria and indicators of SLIMFs on the basis of actual certification experience. The US Tree Farm programme is a model designed to assist non-industrial private forest owners so that they can afford to become part of an industrial chain of custody certified supply chain. The PEFC certification model in Europe has developed a certification process for cooperative tree owners as a form of group certification system. These have increased access to SFEs but many of the inherent barriers remain.

Rainforest Alliance is implementing an innovative programme to address market barriers. The TREES programme works with US and Mesoamerican SFEs in small holder market linkage pilots. The programme includes analysis of the market barriers to gain a greater understanding of the market linkage issues and technical assistance to help SFEs make changes in selected landscapes or along specific product lines. Market linkages to processing industries and buyers with demand for types of wood products generated by SFEs are explored to increase marketability on a small scale

Recommendations

• Improve the systems of forest certification so that they are more equitable to the scale and efficiency of SFEs so as to increase their competitiveness in the market.
• Recognise that SFEs face specific barriers that will remain once they become certified. Provide adequate donor financing for complementary support activities that help SFEs to address these barriers and improve their efficiency and market access, including attention to market linkages.
• Explore alternative models for those community and smallholder forests which do not have sufficient market access to benefit from forest certification but wish to improve the sustainability and environmental returns from their forest operations.

Further information:
Dr Rebecca Butterfield
Training, Research, Education, Extension and Systems (TREES) programme, Rainforest Alliance
65 Millet St.
Richmond VT USA 05477
E-mail: rbutterfield@ra.org

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