Tropical Forest Trust (TFT) has expanded the global supply of sustainable and legally verifiable tropical timber products to $200 millión by tracking wood 'stump-to-store'.
TFT has rapidly expanded the China and Africa focus of its efforts, which constitutes arguably the world's strongest system for excluding illegal tropical woods from commercial supply chains. TFT has developed a sophisticated procurement system that allows its member companies - liké leading home improvement retailers B&Q in the UK, France's Castorama and Leroy Merlin, and the US's Crate and Barrel - to verify that the tropical wood products they purchase come from sustainable or legal sources. The system alsó helps ensure that trees are extracted from forestry operations that work with TFT to improve conservation, respect local community rights and protect biodiversity.
"Tropical forest devastation by illegal logging is a complex, global problem but China's future resource needs - it's already purchasing 50% of the world's tropical hardwood production -figure heavily intő any intemational effort to fight it," explains Scott Poynton, Executive Director of the Geneva-based TFT (www.tropicalforesttrust.com). "The good news is we're seeing growing interest in bringing to China our 'good wood, good business' approach to buying tropical timber."
TFT has opened an office in Beijing and will soon expand to Shanghai in an effort to ensure that China's growing role in Africa and other tropical regions supports ratherthan undermines the move to fight illegal logging. TFT is developing a variety of timber purchasing projects in China in partnership with wood product companies, its members, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Timber Trade Federation, and the EU Timber Trade Action Plán (TTAP).
TFT offers its members and clients a wood control system that tracks logs from the stump in the forest where they origínate, through to the mill where they're made, intő products such as a piece of plywood, a package of flooring or an ensemble of garden furniture. The tracking continues as they move intő stores across the world where they're sold to consumers who want to use their purchasing power to preserve tropical forests. The system is unique because it places TFT staff in factories throughout the production process, where they check wood flows and flag any problems to prevent ill-gotten timber from being shipped to unsuspecting customers.
"The intemational wood business is so full of traders and middlemen operating in a world of bribes, corruption and illegal practices that, unfortunately, we encourage buyers to assume everyone is guilty until proven otherwise," said Poynton. "Ali other checking systems rely on routinely unreliable annual audits that usually occur long after products have been made and sold. If ever auditors manage to find a problem, it's way too laté. The product is already adorning someone's house or garden. We thus have to stop the illegal wood entering the supply chain at the source and that's what our Wood Control Systems do."
Africa's natural resources are seen as a major attraction for