Western consciences can do only so much to conserve forests
Sep 23rd 2010 | From The Economist print edition
IN JUNE last year Daniel Avelino, the public prosecutor of Brazil’s state of Pará, the home of most of the Amazon cattle-herd, probably saved more rainforest than many conservation groups ever will. He identified 20 big ranches operating on illegally cleared land and traced the slaughterhouses buying their cattle. He then established that some of the world’s best-known retailers, including Wal-Mart and Carrefour, were buying meat from them. He fined the ranchers and abattoirs 2 billion reais ($1.2 billion) and told the retailers that unless they cleaned up their supply chains he would fine them, too.
The response was dramatic. Overnight, the retailers stopped buying meat from Pará and the slaughterhouses closed. To get themselves off the hook, and cows back on it, the abattoirs vowed that in future they would deal only with ranchers who had registered their names and property details and promised not to deforest illegally. Over 20,000 have done so. In the absence of a reliable land registry, Mr Avelino says this will make it much easier to bring illegal deforesters to book. “Once I know who owns the farm, I can send the fine through the post,” he says.
Around the same time Greenpeace waded in with a report on the role of Amazon beef in deforestation. That, too, hit at the rich end of the industry’s supply chain, linking beef and leather from the Amazon to companies such as Adidas, Nike, Toyota, Gucci and Kraft. Many have since agreed to work with Greenpeace against illegal deforestation. And Wal-Mart has promised to trace its products from the manger to the refrigerator.
That is the upside of growing global demand for tropical food, timber and biofuels: pressure for Western standards to be adopted up the supply chain. This is driven by the eco-worries of Western consumers—and the activists who play on them. Having been long since given the brush-off by rainforest governments, they are finding companies that operate in tropical countries and sell to Western markets much more responsive.
Nestlé, a giant food company, is another of Greenpeace’s recent targets. The environmentalists made a spoof advertisement for one of the company’s chocolate bars, KitKat, which contains palm oil, and published it on the internet. The ad shows an office worker munching on a chocolate bar which turns out to be the bloody severed finger of an orang-utan. This scored more than 1.5m online hits and put Nestlé in a panic. It stopped buying palm oil from its main Indonesian supplier, Sinar Mas, a big conglomerate with a reputation for chewing up rainforest, and said it would purge from its supply chain any producer linked to illegal deforestation. It has since promised to get 50% of its palm oil from sustainable sources next year. And unconvinced by the standard of most of this “sustainable” oil, Nestlé is setting its own.
Three reasons for pessimism
But there are three black clouds over this sunny scene. The first is financial: eco-concerned consumers may want sustainable products, but they do not want to pay more for them. That does not matter much to Nestlé because it buys only 320,000 tonnes of palm oil a year, just 0.7% of global output. It is a bigger problem for Wal-Mart, which deals in bulk and has tight margins. It expects to charge no more for its green beef than for its current offering. That will raise questions about how green it really is. To track an animal efficiently in the Amazon might well involve expensive technologies. Uruguay, for example, has a system of microchipping calves that costs about $20 a head. That may be beyond Wal-Mart’s budget.
The same problem haunts the main forest-related certification scheme, for timber. It dates back to 1993, when the Forest Stewardship Council, an alliance of greens and loggers, drew up a list of rules for sustainable forestry. The hope was that consumer demand for FSC-certified wood products would force logging companies to adopt the scheme. But only about 15% of timber globally, and less than 2% of tropical timber, is covered by it. Getting certified is expensive, costing about $50,000 per concession, and the returns are often meagre. Tests by the Home Depot, America’s biggest purveyor of FSC-stamped products, suggest that barely a third of customers would pay a premium of 2% for a certified product, not enough to green even Western retailers.
The second cloud over tropical certification schemes, as Wal-Mart may find, is doubt about their reliability. Some also say that sustainable tropical logging is impossible. Remove 200-year-old Amazon mahogany or Congolese sapele trees and the species may go locally extinct. And although it is true, as loggers argue, that extracting old, slow-growing trees and preserving their carbon in expensive furniture may represent a net sequestration opportunity, high levels of wastage make the argument less convincing. So does the fact that a logged forest can be much less permanent than a mahogany table.
Loggers do most harm to forests not by removing trees but by building roads that give land-grabbers access to them. To get FSC certification, companies need to prevent such trespass. But logging roads remain long after loggers have moved on. In Africa they represent a particular threat to precious forest fauna, including chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, by connecting forests to the fast-growing cities where bushmeat is prized. Along a fresh logging road in southern Cameroon, your correspondent once saw many hunters—and the half-eaten remains of two gorillas.
In messy countries like Cameroon, certification schemes get corrupted. At best, certifiers may struggle to examine vast concessions on brief visits, as the guests of loggers who are also paying their fee. Further down the supply chain, timber-dealers and factories are often certified largely on the strength of documents which may be illegally bought. This also allows inventories to be inflated and illegal wood to enter the supply chain. And there is still plenty about, despite the recent reduction reported in Cameroon and elsewhere.
Who cares?
The third factor undermining certification schemes is the most important: the majority of tropical commodities are not consumed in eco-sensitive markets. Most rainforest timber is used locally. In Brazil, for instance, the proportion is 80%. And the biggest importers of tropical timber, China and India, show scant concern for its provenance (though China, the biggest exporter of wood-based products to Western markets, has recently seemed to care a bit more). China and India are also the biggest importers of palm oil. Brazilian beef goes mainly to Russia, Iran, Hong Kong and Egypt. They are not tree-huggers.
This highlights one of the biggest problems in forest conservation. Most of the changes it requires, such as rational land-use planning, law enforcement and the rest, have to be led by governments. Market-led schemes can succeed up to a point, as Greenpeace has often shown, but without government support they soon hit their limits. On the other hand, when governments put their weight behind conservation, a fair bit of progress is possible.
Western governments are starting to do their bit. A 2008 amendment to America’s Lacey act has made it an offence to import illegal timber. This puts the onus on federal authorities to prove illegality, which can be difficult, especially when the wood is from a dodgy place, like Cameroon, and processed by a less dodgy one, like China. Nor is legality the same as sustainability, but often they are close. Gibson Guitar, an iconic American company, is at risk of becoming the first victim of this reform. It is being investigated on suspicion of knowingly importing illegal Madagascan rosewood.
In July the EU also passed a law criminalising the import of illegal timber. Its strict rules on beef imports, which demand traceability in producer countries, could one day help reform Brazil’s cattle practice. But it would be far better if Brazil were to decide to take such steps itself.
Source: The Economist Online
