Our keyboards took a pounding on January 19. It was just one of those days; you wait for one initiative with repercussions for the timber trade from our esteemed political leaders, and three come along at once.
Firstly during the conference on International Forest Governance and Trade at Chatham House, minister Gareth Thomas said that the government was dedicating £24m to the war on illegal logging.
At the same event, a new sustainable timber initiative was heralded from a group of 25 EU and African timber producers, importers and end users, including the Timbmet Group. The full details of the scheme, which was devised in consultation with the government (hence the title “Industry and Ministerial Agreement”), will be released in a few weeks. But Timbmet chief executive Simon Fineman said it would prove a “vital step towards the introduction of measures to support and encourage further good practice”.
Just as these announcements were sinking in, parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee unleashed its report on Sustainable Timber. The essence of this is that more needs to be done to encourage sustainable timber production and that the government’s sustainable timber procurement pol-icy will be flawed unless it takes into account the “social implications” of its timber sourcing (regardless of the fact that no-one is asking the plastics, steel and concrete industries to account for the “social implications” of their activities).
These initiatives have different implications for the trade. But now the dust has settled from the barrage of developments it’s clear a common thread runs through them; timber and forest industries and their environmental performance are more than ever in the sights of government, the greens, specifiers, end users and the public (and “illegal timber” was also tackled on Radio 4’s You and Yours consumer watchdog programme this week). So, it seems generally agreed, the pressure has never been greater for the timber trade as a whole to pre-empt the news and respond to it.
