Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes

Abstract

The creation of PEFC can be linked to fears amongst certain forestry interests of a monopoly of FSC certification in Europe. German publishers and printing houses had been under pressure from Greenpeace since 1993 to cease using paper sourced from old growth or poorly managed forests in Nordic countries. In 1995 the Association of German Paper Producers and the Association of German Magazine Publishers issued a statement committing themselves to products that could be sourced under a credible global programme. NGOs had not insisted on FSC, but publishers had the FSC programme in mind. In cooperation with various European forest owner groups, Finnish forestry interests collaborated in a campaign focused on Axel Springer Verlag as well as Otto Versand, two of the largest publishers and consumers of FSC paper in Germany. In December 1997 800 people from 11 European countries demonstrated outside the companies’ offices in Hamburg, condemning the companies’ support for FSC. This event has been identified as ‘the psychological point of origin of the European forest certification system’.¹