The failure of EU agriculture ministers at the Council of the European Union (CEU) this week to back tougher anti-illegal timber legislation has been criticised by the UK environment minister, The Timber Trade Federation (TTF) and environmental NGOs.
Earlier proposals for EU rules had included a European equivalent of the US Lacey Act, making it an offence to trade and possess timber harvested in breach of the laws of the country of origin. Penalties under the latter include heavy fines and even imprisonment and some European ministers wanted new EU rules backed with these sanctions too.
But this proposal and others, including one to make it an offence to place illegally harvested timber on the market and another radically to expand the system of voluntary partnership agreements with producer countries to help them develop sustainable forest management, were rejected. The conclusion was that all these had “significant drawbacks that could limit their effectiveness”. Instead the majority of ministers at the meeting backed measures obliging those involved in first making timber and wood products available on the EU market to “ensure, as far as possible, that these are legally logged”, but without the back-up of full legal prohibition on illegal wood.
The UK was one country, along with the Netherlands and Spain, in favour of an outright illegal timber ban and refused to back the approved proposal, which will now go to a second reading at the EU parliament next year.
“The key word used in the proposal is ‘restrict’ – it’s not good enough,” said UK environment minister Huw Iranca-Davies. “We shouldn’t be restricting illegal timber entering our market, we should be prohibiting it. The EU has a duty to ensure that suppliers check that their timber is coming from a legitimate source and we’ll continue to push it on stopping illegal timber from coming onto the market.”
TTF head of sustainability Rachel Butler supported the minister. “The TTF strongly believes that a prohibition is necessary to set a level playing field and help us promote use of timber as the most sustainable building material,” she said, adding that TTF hoped prohibition could yet be approved by the EU parliament.
Greenpeace EU forest policy director Sebastien Risso said that “while the international community discusses measures to cut carbon emissions from deforestation at Copenhagen, EU governments are opposing measures that could reduce illegal logging and Europe’s destructive impact on the world’s forests”.
