A recent piece in a local London paper highlighted the total gobbledygook used by officials to explain the EU Action Plan for Sustainable Forestry Management, including “a participatory and collaborative approach to policy formulation and implementation is a pre-condition for good governance”.
There’s a lot of this fancy language about, expounded by people who have no real care or interest in what happens on the ground.
Fraser Steele runs a progressive business in Scotland, distributing construction timber with an extremely low moisture content – the type of material that we all should have been aiming for before we lost large chunks of our market share to competitor products.
He has invested a huge amount in this very successful venture and environmental accreditation, by way of chain of custody (CoC), is a key part of his marketing strategy.
It was therefore depressing for him to find that, when one of his large customers researched the local contractors working on council projects that require CoC, they had never received an enquiry. Why? Because they were buying from companies that just issued pack labels or copies of their suppliers’ paperwork as proof.
In other words, as usual, at the top of the tree we’ve got some very puffed up, fancily worded stuff expounding on how we’re all meant to behave and in the real world it’s just ignored. In fairness, the complexity of the whole system is hard to grasp for many people but, no matter how you look at it, it’s a dubious practice.
So, perhaps another few hundred pages of long-winded blather will sort this out? Let’s get real; we need less top-end bureaucracy and some investment in action on the ground. We also need the people imposing all this stuff to become streetwise; surely they must realise that fancy certificates and labelling are a form of currency, so why not make it clear on them that they’re not proof of CoC?
A story in TTJ March 5/12 – “False legality certificates prompt TTF warning” – showed that this is happening globally. Let’s sort out our own house and use some basic language: “If you cheat, you’ll be having a chat with Trading Standards!”
