Complaints about Chain of Custody certification

While forest management and Chain of Custody (CoC) certification were tested in "safe" conditions in Europe and North America during their first decade, adopting and sustaining certificates in "medium" and "high" risk countries is significantly more difficult. For the last decade, the globalization of supply chains has placed the idea of forest and CoC certification under serious strain.

 

Certification schemes have always been under intense pressure to change their standards and systems from stakeholders and the growing market. PEFC and FSC are notable for their willingness to consider and react to stakeholder opinions and experiences, which is fairly uncommon in the sustainability certification business. They run the most credible objectives and set processes in the world. Even the finest systems, however, are vulnerable to abuse and fraud in a world where half of all things traded on the worldwide market are forgeries.

 

Recent stakeholder criticism of FSC and PEFC relates to this cost of CoC certification concern and targets the absence of monitoring of the certified product flow. Chain of custody certification merely indicates that the company has the theoretical ability and authority to handle certified products, but in fact, they may not handle any certified raw materials at all. Given that CoC audits are just snapshots of the scenario performed once a year in stated audits, auditors are largely powerless to identify fraud and false labelling that may have occurred throughout the year.

 

The growing complexity of supply chains, worries about fake labelling, and the lack of monitoring of product flow in the supply chain are all major difficulties confronting cost of CoC certification. We must not, however, lose the essential principle of forest and CoC certification. There are currently no short-term alternatives for controlling environmentally and socially responsible commerce in wood products.