A World Tour Of Forest Certification With Heiko Liedeker

USA: FSC has mostly been adopted on State lands in the US, in many cases in conjunction with SFI. Only a few players in the forest and paper sector have adopted it, an example being Potlatch. Can you comment on the potential further adoption in the forest and paper sector in the States of FSC and the relatively peaceful co-existence between FSC and SFI that can be observed over the past two or three years? Heiko Liedeker: First of all a lot of the major players in the US they have already adopted FSC, just not in the United States. Everywhere else they are FSC certified or are in the process of FSC certification. It’s the same with some of the European companies. We’re confident that over time this will also happen in the US, because it just doesn’t make business sense to maintain two certification systems within the same company, two different marketing strategies and so on, only because of some political loyalty with the SFI and the American Forest and Product Association (AF&PA). We feel that unless SFI gains more recognition in the market it will not be able to compete with FSC in the long run. We of course see that some of the success of the Canadian companies will also have major impact on that. How do you see this co-existence of the two schemes right now? Heiko Liedeker: We are co-existing. We are competing of course like we compete with other schemes too. The schemes as such never had real conflict. I think that some of our stakeholders like civil society organizations, corporate sector and buyers position themselves very clearly on which scheme they like and what they don’t like about other schemes. This is up to our stakeholders. For us there has always been a peaceful co-existence between SFI and FSC and the same with PEFC. Finland: You are aware that the Finnish Forest Certification scheme is covering most of the country and also that the standard was initially developed with a multi-stakeholder process back in the late 80’s. Do you think it is really a worthwhile fight for FSC to expand in Finland while most of these forests are already under the Finnish certification scheme? Heiko Liedeker: The market will show. We know for example that a lot of the Finnish companies are certifying their holdings outside Finland. Finland depends to a large degree on imports from Russia, especially roundwood imports. Now the Russian government is very clear that they don’t want to export roundwood, at least in the long run. They would like to build up processing capacities within their own country. We have very good engagements there. In the end the market will show. We are going to offer services to the Finnish forest owners and forest companies, as we offer them to any country, any company, anywhere in the world, and the market will show whether FSC expands in Finland or whether that stays PEFC as it is. http://certificationwatch.org/article.php3?id_article=4103

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