The world's trees are in trouble. Half of global forests have disappeared, deforestation continues, and the health of remaining forests is declining rapidly. Friends of the Earth is calling for strong controls on the forest industry and a halt to illegal logging and the unsustainable conversion of forests to agriculture and pastures. We oppose "carbon sink" schemes that replace diverse forests with tree plantations. We need drastic reductions in energy consumption and paper use and the export of grains for cattle feed in order to conserve the forests that remain.

We believe that sustainable forest management and small-scale agriculture can best be left to Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and that these people should be granted land and resource rights.

Photo credit: WWF - Cannon

Illegal logging

Each year 13 million hectares of forest dissappear according to the UN, illegal logging being one of the main causes.

This illegal logging:

• causes extreme losses of unique plants and animals

• has huge impacts on the lives of indigenous peoples depending on those forest.

• contributes to climate change

• costs timber producing countries 10 to 15 billion dollars a year, according to the World Bank

• distorts markets: illegal timber is much cheaper than its sustainable equivalent

The EU on illegal logging

In 2003 the European Union (EU) launched the Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan to combat illegal logging and related trade. Read more here.

The EU has been mainly working on two aspects of the FLEGT Action Plan:

1) Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs)

VPAs aim to help signatory countries improve their governance and law enforcement and help themimplement a licensing system to ensure that they only export legal timber to Europe.

To date only Malaysia, Indonesia and Ghana have officially started negotiations with the EU. VPAs have substantial potential pitfalls, which are described in a joint NGO statement. For example, VPAs will most probably not include secondary processed products and circumvention via China and other countries specialized in wood processing.

2) Additional options for further measures

In December 2006 the EU published opened a public consultation about additional options for further measures, which will last until the 5th of March. These submissions will be considered as part of the EU's decision-making process.

A number of options are discussed, including: (1) vigorously pursuing VPAs, (2) private sector voluntary schemes, (3) import ban and (4) legislation requiring that only legally harvested timber and timber products are placed on the EU market.

We are recommending that the EU adopts legislation that will prohibit illegally harvested timber products, as a matter of urgency.

The legislation must ensure that only timber products from legal sources and responsibly managed forests are placed on the EU market. The EU has to put in place a law that would make it a criminal act to import or sell illegal timber and timber products in the EU. This would mean that companies would have to prove- through verifiable documentation- that they are selling products that have not been produced in contravention of any international treaties or laws in the country where the timber was harvested. Crucially, the law will oblige companies to develop the means to trace where the timber came from - from the shelf all the way back to the forest.

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