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... We here examine several options for independent certification of community forests with a view to legal timber harvest.
A number of certification standards and types have been developed world-wide, with the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC; www.pefc.org)
and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC; info.fsc.org) being the most widely recognised standards for Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) and Chain of Custody (CoC) certification.
This report considers the suitability of both systems in the context of nationally recognised community forest management in Myanmar, through the conduct of a rapid field assessment of the constraints and opportunities in two forest user group networks in Tanintharyi region and Kachin State.
Certification concepts and our initial findings were presented in a roundtable meeting in Yangon in August hosted jointly with EcoDev and the Myanmar Timber Merchants
Association, and attended by RECOFTC, Myanmar Forest Certification Committee, IUCN and other stakeholders. The presentations are reproduced in Annex 1 and 2.
Our rapid field evaluation shows that, in the case study sites, an external review by an accredited timber certifier – either Forest Stewardship Council or the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification – would currently cost more than the benefits it will bring to the to smallholders. The main constraints are that; a) managed
areas are currently too small (
