Summary
• GFTN India was launched in New Delhi on December 3, 2008.
• GFTN’s work in India is funded by Homebase and the EC “Switch Asia” programme.
• Demand for timber in India will treble in the next decade.
India is the latest country to join the WWF’s Global Forest & Trade Network (GFTN) initiative.
The GFTN is an international partnership between the green NGO and the forest products supply, processing and distribution sectors to encourage sustainable timber sourcing. It started out in the major consuming countries in Europe and North America, where some of the big names now involved include IKEA, Homebase, St Gobain and WalMart. Subsequently it expanded its remit to include key timber producers, such as Cameroon, Gabon, Brazil and Russia, and it now operates in 35 countries in total.
Connecting the markets to the producers was a natural progression for the WWF, and the latest move, creating connections with the timber processing intermediaries was the next logical step. A big breakthrough in this respect came in November 2005 when China was brought on board and the addition of India, which officially joined on December 3, represents a further major step forward.
India is the world’s 10th largest economy (growing another 7% in 2008) and has a population of over a billion, 25% of whom rely on forests for their livelihoods.
Forest covers 21% of the country, but there are still only eight Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) chain of custody (CoC) certificates and 644ha of certified forests. Add to the mix the fact that India will struggle to produce any more timber, while its demand is set to treble in the next decade, and it’s easy to see why WWF was so interested in getting the country into the GFTN.
Until recently there has been little demand for certification in India. This is now changing, partly because its wood imports are rising to keep up with demand for finished products, causing concern for international buyers with strict responsible purchasing standards. Around five years ago the Indian market began to feature in the export statistics for countries such as Ghana, Malaysia and Indonesia. The GFTN retailers feared that, as in China, the imported wood might be illegally harvested or from unsustainable sources.
India’s main trading partners for wood and fibre are Indonesia, Ghana and Papua New Guinea, all countries with well-publicised illegal logging problems and, as its consumption grows, any country with logs available is going to be a target for Indian importers. With few certification schemes in place or associated CoC certificates, India faced losing valuable export markets, particularly in the US and Europe.
The new GFTN-India is designed to address this problem. Ten Indian companies supplying timber, wood products, and paper to Europe and the US, are planning to become the first participants and the principal funding for the first two years will come from the UK’s Homebase – one of the founders of the first GFTN in the UK in the 1990s.
GFTN-India will encourage trade links between companies which are committed to achieving responsible forestry, and will aim to create market conditions that support forest conservation whilst providing economic and social benefits for the businesses and people that depend on them. The European Commission “Switch Asia” programme has also guaranteed financial support for the next three years.
In India there is a growing hunger for certification and the sustainable forestry practices it encourages. The wood processing sector is increasingly keen to prove legality and get certified or find market access is limited – a consistent message from the multi-sector audience at the GFTN-India launch in New Delhi.
“GFTN is important to help fill the gaps in the supply chain to ensure that there is a comprehensive approach to the issues,” said Robert Donkers, part of the EC delegation to the event.
Retailers had a similar perspective: “We have been doing increasing business here for some time but, as soon as we start asking some probing questions about legality or certification, there are frustrated noises but no concrete results,” said Charles Drewe from Homebase.
The aim of the GFTN is to help India to make a difference – to address the issues of forest protection without sacrificing economic growth. It will try to help the country’s forest owners – including the Indian government which owns 90% – to move towards forest certification, to match buyers to suppliers nationally and globally, and to stimulate the economy by opening up the market place to GFTN participants around the world. GFTN will look to grow the market, initially engaging with exporters, importers and forest managers in a bid to allow the market to develop responsibly.
