The Potential of Sustainable Forestry Certification for Smallholder Tree Growing - Smallholder Tree Growing for Rural Development and Environmental Services - page 203

In addition to these certification systems are a number of national certification
schemes, which are not independently verified. In South-East Asia, examples include
the Indonesian LEI system and Ecoforestry certification in Papua New Guinea. Like
MTCC, these national systems are becoming more in line with the requirements of
the FSC, with the aim of improving their reputations (Cashore et al. 2006).
Figure 10.1 presents the increase of forests, certified under the six forest certifi-
cation initiatives mentioned above, for the period 1998-2006. In 2006 about 275
million hectares were certified by one of these six organizations (UNECE/FAO)
2006. This should be compared to the global total natural forest area for the year
2000 estimated at 3,682 million hectares, excluding plantations (FAO 2001). This
means that in 2006, 7.5 percent of the natural forest areas were certified by one of
the above schemes. But globally, certified timber products represent less than one
percent of forest product sales (UNECE 2001). This seems to imply that on the
average certification is applied to less productive forests.
The certified areas are not equally distributed throughout the world. At the end
of 2000, about 92 percent of all certified forests were located in the United States,
Canada, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany and Poland. At the same time, only
four countries with tropical moist forests (Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala and Mexico)
were listed as having more than 100,000 ha of certified forests. According to FAO
(2001) these forests amounted to a combined total area of 1.8 million hectares,
which is about one percent of the total certified forest area. Kollert and Lagan
(2007) presented a more recent figure of 3.6 million hectares, that amounts to
nearly two percent (see Table 10.1). Despite the fact that forest certification
started in the South, with the Smartwood Program of the Rainforest Alliance in
1990 in Indonesia, and despite the present increase in developing countries, we

275
250
225

200
175
150
125
100
75
50
25
0

FSC
CSA
SFI
ATFS

PEFC
CSA, also endorsed by PEFC
SFI, also endorsed by PEFC

Fig. 10.1 The development of the certified forestry area worldwide for the period 1998-2006
under five different schemes (UNECE/FAO 2006)