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FOREST CERTIFICATION AND COMMUNITIES: LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT DECADE

By Augusta Molnar

Since its inception, forest certification has aimed to address social as well as environmental goals. For that reason, the FSC and its certifiers (mainly Smartwood) and supporting donors have aggressively supported community certification. At present, about 50 community enterprises have been certified worldwide and a number of others have a process of certification underway. This small but diverse sample provides a rich set of lessons to help guide all certification schemes that have an interest in community forest management.

The linkage between certification and communities is important because forest communities are increasingly major stewards of the world's forests, especially in tropical countries. One quarter of the forests in the developing world is currently community owned or managed; a figure that is likely to double in the next 15 years. This is based on the continued recognition of indigenous and other community rights, which may easily include 700-800 million ha of the total global 3.6 billion ha. Until now, certification has reached less than 1% of community forests. With no changes to certification systems, it is unlikely to reach more than 2% of all community forests in the next decade. This is worrisome because of the very significant contribution that forest communities can make to sustainable forestry.

To understand the impact of, and barriers to, certification on communities and suggest actions for the future, Forest Trends carried out a comprehensive evaluation of the existing studies and case material, interviewed and organised discussions with more than 60 individuals involved in forest certification as certifiers, accreditors, clients, researchers or promoters.

Dilemmas
There is a growing paradox between expanding the area of community certification and expanding third-party forest certification for industry, private individual and government forests. There is a strong demand for a simplification of procedures and a minimisation of costs for small-scale enterprises including community-based enterprises, but there is also demand for a longer and more detailed assessment with a rising bar for social and environmental criteria. NGOs are particularly concerned about the certification of industrial and state enterprises where land tenure rights of indigenous peoples and other local residents are not established. Recent debates in Indonesia over the potential certification of state-owned forests include unresolved dilemmas over the treatment of high-value conservation forest, treatment of local property rights, corruption among authorities and companies, and issues of labour conditions and local benefit sharing. There is also a growing tension between increasing the amount of certified timber and wood products so that the certified markets can grow and increase market share, and establishing and applying sufficiently rigorous standards to maintain the credibility of the forest certification instrument.

Barriers
Much fewer communities have qualified for certification than expected and, to date, the experience has been confined mainly to Mexico, Canada, USA, Guatemala and the Philippines. While a number of new communities are in the process of scoping or assessment for new certification, a number of issues have emerged that create barriers. Many communities face policy and regulatory barriers to extracting and processing forest products, or controlling rights to the environmental services generated. The cost of the assessment and auditing process is high for small operations. Given the fact most community enterprises are incipient, there have been numerous pre-conditions or conditions for them to qualify for certification, requiring them to seek donor financing to pay for these or substantially increase costs relative to their returns. Communities are found in more remote areas where markets are not developed for certified products and do not pay a premium, making the additional cost impractical.

The small-scale and incipient nature of community operations has made it difficult for communities to generate the quantity and quality of products that a certified market would demand. Communities are too risky an investment to attract the required finance and face internal constraints to make organisational changes towards a more profitable business model. Where cultural differences are large between certifiers and communities, the process of certification can also come into conflict with the natural path of evolution of the community enterprise and its natural resource management models.

Adjustments
Some recent innovations introduced by certifiers address a number of these issues. Recently, the application of rules for Small and Low-Intensity Managed Forests (SLIMFs) was approved by the FSC General Assembly with provisions for group certification within them and there are proposals for introducing a step-wise or modular certification to provide more time to achieve best practices.

More adjustments are still needed. Certification schemes need to recognise the larger set of client communities dependent on multiple income streams or just starting up enterprises. Communities with multiple income streams face the dilemma of which products to certify: wood, non-wood, conservation practices, environmental services or eco-agriculture. So far, we have no answer for these communities, either in helping them evolve into enterprises, bear the cost of more sustainable management by linking them to markets, or fight the battle for greater resource rights and access.

Recommendations
Forest Trends recommends two related sets of actions, both of which require more active collaboration among the various stakeholders:

• Revisit the objectives of certification and modify the criteria and indicators and process of certification to reach a wider range of forest communities, taking advantage of long-standing practices of communities that achieve the same set of goals, but in a different way.
• In forest communities for which forest certification is not a currently viable option, efforts are needed to foster and expand coverage of alternative SFM instruments (fair trade, ethnical collection standards, the deregulation of market barriers, the devolution of rights and responsibilities and business support). Alternatives must address the multiple income streams that many forest communities derive from the forest to ensure that the SFM instrument is not excessively expensive.

Reference:
Molnar, A. (2003). Forest certification and communities: looking forward to the next decade. Washington: Forest Trends. Available on http:// www.forest-trends.org.

Further information:
Dr Augusta Molnar
Forest Trends
1050 Potomac Street NW
20007 Washington DC
USA
E-mail: amolnar@forest-trends.org

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