50 | Sector Focus: North America
Above: The US panel at the symposium
◄ While it may underscore the sustainability of the resource, a longer term issue for the industry is that US hardwoods are under-utilised, said Mr Meyer. “Forest standing volumes are doubling compared to what we’re harvesting,” he said. “That’s a real problem.” It’s against that backdrop that the new EUDR could potentially throw up obstacles to US exports to the EU.
Details of the new regulation were given by Silvia Melegari, secretary-general of the Confederation of European Woodworking Industries.
She explained that under the regulation, countries supplying the EU with the FERCs it covers will be benchmarked according to perceived risk of deforestation and forest degradation. EU ‘operators’ which first place products on the market, will then have to undertake proportionate levels of due diligence on supply chains. Products will be deemed ‘deforestation-free’ provided the land they came from has not been subject to deforestation or degradation since December 2020.
Ms Melegari said that the requirement for geolocation co-ordinates of the plots of forest land where commodities originate applies to all above 7ha.
Businesses will also have to prove that EU exports of the covered commodities are deforestation-free.
EUDR A SEVERE BARRIER Mr Oliver said that, although AHEC fundamentally supports the EUDR’s objective, it sees its geolocation requirement as a “severe barrier” to US hardwood. He described it as a backward step from the EU Timber Regulation, which it supersedes, as the latter was a two-way exchange between supplier countries and the EU aimed at helping the former improve legality and sustainability assurance. But EUDR implementation is
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“very much an internal review process”. He described it as “inequitable for the type of non-industrial forest ownership” which pertains not just in the US, but many other supplier countries.
SUSTAINABILITY CERTIFICATION SOLUTION However, the presentation of the new, AHEC-initiated Sustainable Hardwood Coalition certification scheme by one of the development team, George White, showed an industry responding to and confident of its ability to meet the sustainability and legality requirements of increasingly regulated timber markets worldwide.
Forest unit certification, such as that of the FSC and PEFC schemes, he explained, has made little headway in the US hardwood forest due to the fragmentation of ownership. So the SHC is being designed to “plug the certification gap” for the country’s millions of small, non-industrial forest operations. The scheme, he said, is building on the bedrock of the strong US forest governance
framework, plus the 2017 AHEC- commissioned independent nationwide study of the risk of illegal or unsustainable hardwood from the US entering international trade. The risk was judged negligible. The SHC scheme will be zero cost to forest owners, with certification covering a whole hardwood producing state, of which there are 33 in total. Jurisdictional risk assessments for these start soon and by the year end all the scheme’s certification standards will be reviewed, subjected to public consultation and endorsed by the SHC. It is hoped that towards the end of 2024 a pilot implementation phase will start to test the associated chain of custody standard. From there, said Mr White, the system can quickly gain momentum thanks to its “simplicity and lower cost due to the existence of SHC-approved state risk assessments”.
The outcome will be proof of provenance to a legality and sustainability assured jurisdiction, not, some would say, such a leap from the EUDR’s ‘deforestation-free’ plot of land. ■
Above: The European panel at the symposium
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