LEGAL VERIFICATION SERVICES |
Is the material used in your wooden products legal? |
Background: The forests in the tropics have been declining at an exponential rate for several decades. Currently a significant proportion of the world trade of timber originates from areas where the trees are felled illegally. Most of the forests in developing countries have been logged without regard for sustainability of the timber resource and associated values the forest provides to society. As such, large areas of tropical forests are either being lost to conversion for agriculture or degraded to poor logging practices and uncontrolled illegal felling activities. A significant amount of timber traded in the international market is derived from illegal sources without proper and ambiguous documentation to trace the raw material to the original forest and even possibly country of origin. Estimates of illegal logging range widely from over 50% in many developing countries to 70% for Indonesia and up to 80% for Brazil. Due to this large scale of illegal timber entering the international market, GFS conducts forest-auditing services to verify legal origin (VLO) and evaluate legal compliance (VLC) within the Wood Tracking Program to support participants to meet their Responsible Purchasing commitments defined in the Action Plan Objectives: • Provide a means for the timber industry to ensure that the products being traded originate for forests that have legal permission to harvest timber (legal origin) • Provide 3rd party verification of compliance with national regulations and standards (legal compliance).
Verified Legal Origin (VLO) GFS will evaluate the traceability of forest products from forest management organizations that can demonstrate legal rights to harvest (whether of short or long term duration) to the forest area. GFS will issue an Audit Statement verifying legal rights to harvest and the system used to trace the origin timber to specific harvesting units. Monitoring of legal origin will be based on periodic verification within the validity of the harvest license for each source of material in high-risk regions. The system of traceability can include manufacturing and trading based on Batch Inspection of a specific volume of material or systems based as in Chainof Custody under the GFS Wood Tracking Program.
Verified Legal Compliance (VLC) Forest management operations that demonstrate compliance to national legal requirements and non-accredited standards such as national draft standards. GFS has developed generic requirements for auditing compliance to national regulations (document # LVP-005) that can be localized for each country. The system used by GFS includes a formal auditing program for participating forest or plantation companies to verify that harvesting practices conform to legal requirements and monitor compliance on a 6 monthly basis. GFS will issue an Assessment Report & Audit Statement verifying legal compliance for the material harvested within the assessed harvesting units. The system of traceability can include manufacturing and trading based on Batch Inspection of a specific volume of material or systems based as in a Chain of Custody under the GFS Wood Tracking Program. GFS has developed generic requirements (LVS 005) for evaluation of legal origin and legal compliance to local and national regulations that include four main elements:
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