How the Forest Stewardship Council is borrowing from Big Oil's playbook
Leading global ethical label continues to certify logging concessions in "isolated" indigenous people's territories in Peru
Just over a year ago I conducted an in-depth interview with the Forest Stewardship Council’s (FSC) International Director General Kim Carstensen. The FSC is reportedly the “world’s largest ethical label”, according to UK NGO Earthsight, and its logo can be found on literally millions of timber or timber-derived products worldwide supposedly guaranteeing that they have been produced sustainably and responsibly.
The reason I interviewed Carstensen was because for over a decade the FSC, despite now claiming to respect and even “prioritise” indigenous people’s rights, has certified two timber concessions in a remote part of the Madre de Dios region in the Peruvian Amazon that include the territories of indigenous people living in “isolation”, most commonly known as the “Mashco-Piro.” Not only is this industrial-scale logging effectively destroying their forest and thereby reducing their access to crucial resources that they depend on to survive, but it risks facilitating or even forcing potentially fatal contact with the Mashco-Piro too.
Such contact is potentially fatal for two main reasons. Either because, as a result of an encounter, however fortuitous or furtive, the loggers could unwittingly transmit germs and diseases to which the Mashco-Piro, given their comparative isolation, have little or no immunity. Or because, as the result of some kind of misunderstanding, which is eminently possible given the language barriers and cultural differences, violence breaks out and someone is killed.
Indeed, that is precisely what happened last year when one logger from the company running the concessions, Maderera Canales Tahuamanu (MCT), was shot and killed with an arrow by the Mashco-Piro, and another was gravely wounded. It was these awful events - which no one could convincingly claim they didn’t envisage coming - that prompted me to interview Carstensen. As he admitted quite candidly, that “tragic incident is a strong indication that something has gone seriously wrong” with the FSC’s certification process.
Nevertheless, a little more than a year later, the FSC - headquartered in Germany - continues to certify MCT, with the company’s current certification scheduled to run until December 2025 and the results of the latest annual audit, conducted by an Estonian-headquartered certifying body called Preferred by Nature (PbN), due to be published soon. This is quite astonishing given that over the years the audits and other documents pertaining to MCT’s certification have openly acknowledged that there is a reserve for indigenous people in “isolation” immediately to the west of the company’s concessions, that the “isolated” people cross the reserve boundary into the concessions, that the entire 52,000 hectare area of their operations is potentially used by the “isolated” peoples, that violent conflict is possible, and that Peru’s state-run Multi-Sector Commission on Indigenous Peoples in Isolation has recognised that MCT’s and other companies’ concessions fall within the “isolated” people’s territories by approving, in 2016, the expansion of the reserve eastwards. Although some years ago MCT, together with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), developed a “Contingency Plan” in case of contact with the people in “isolation”, that Plan had still not been implemented when last year’s annual audit was done, according to PbN.
Arguably even more important, though, is what the audits and other documents don’t say: that when the reserve for the indigenous people in “isolation” was initially proposed over 20 years ago it included the area that later became MCT’s concessions on the grounds that, as anyone familiar with the region would have known, that forest is part of the “isolated” people’s territories - hence the Multi-Sector Commission’s 2016 decision to expand the reserve, although that still hasn’t actually happened yet. However, when the reserve was established, in April 2002, it was only 34% of the area that had been proposed, and then the following month MCT signed the contracts for its two concessions.
In other words, instead of including that forest in an intangible reserve to protect the Mashco-Piro, Peru’s government gave it to the logging industry. Then nine years later the FSC came along and started certifying MCT, as they have continued to do to this day.
When I asked PbN if they weren’t aware of this crucial historical and anthropological context, I was told that the only “persons that may provide more information are currently conducting field work.”
In late October national indigenous federation AIDESEP wrote to Carstensen and others at the FSC about this issue, as they revealed last week in a public statement. That statement describes MCT’s operations as posing a “serious and imminent threat” to the Mashco-Piro’s survival, and urges the FSC to stop certifying “the sale of timber that comes from concessions located in the territories of isolated indigenous peoples, in order to comply with their own guidelines.”
Doesn’t the FSC’s ongoing MCT certification make a blatant mockery of its claims to respect and “prioritise” indigenous people’s rights? After putting that question to Carstensen, I was sent a frankly extraordinary statement from an FSC spokesperson claiming, among other things, that the company’s concessions are not part of the Mashco-Piro’s territories. In resorting to that kind of desperate, preposterous assertion, the FSC has turned to doing what certain oil and gas companies have increasingly done over the last 15 years or so in an attempt to defend their operations in parts of the remote Amazon inhabited by indigenous people in “isolation”: claim they don’t exist, or there’s no evidence for them, or they don’t use the areas where the company is operating.
“Based on the information gathered during assessments, Assurance Services International [FSC’s “assurance partner”] and FSC did not find evidence that the Mashco Piro tribe is legally entitled to the concession owned by MCT or are present there,” the FSC statement runs. “They understand the Mashco Piro's territory is adjacent, and despite the tragic contact incident in August 2022, MCT took adequate steps to maintain distance using buffer zones and worker training.”
Somehow the FSC has come to this ludicrous conclusion despite the tragic incident last year, despite all the evidence collected for more than 20 years by indigenous federations that the Mashco-Piro live in that forest, despite the likes of the WWF and countless other NGOs and researchers agreeing, despite the FSC’s own certifying bodies doing likewise, and despite Peru’s Ministry of Culture and Multi-Sector Commission accepting it as well and approving the expansion of the reserve eastwards to include MCT’s concessions.
The FSC should be ashamed of itself. Do some proper research and stop endangering people’s lives in the remote Amazon!
Addendum: Just over a day after this article was published the FSC told me it wished to make a “crucial clarification” and sent a short statement, although actually it is very vague. “The public summary of the ASI assessment report, accessible through ASI’s website, indicates that there is confirmation from both the company and stakeholders acknowledging the presence of the Mashco Piro along the river within the forest management unit,” the FSC told me. However, if that is intended to imply that, contrary to the FSC’s initial statement, the ASI report accepts that MCT’s concessions are part of the Mashco-Piro’s territories, then it would be untrue - because the report quite clearly does not do that.