New CoC standard for forest operations
Based on the Forest Stewardship Council's requirements, the Rainforest Alliance has developed a Chain of Custody standard for FSC-certified forest operations wishing to sell their forest products as FSC-certified.
The standard is part of an effort to streamline and facilitate the auditing process, and represents a more explicit way of stating the chain of custody requirements that already exist for forest operations. Thus, it does not imply any significant changes in the actual requirements for forest operations.
As of 15 March 2009, the new CoC standard is applicable to forest operations holding an FSC certificate issued by the Rainforest Alliance and selling only standing stock, raw logs and/or wood chips. Compliance with the standard will be verified during the 2009 audits.
The advantage of clear rules
The chain of custody requirements applicable to forest operations are not included in the FSC global or national forest management standards, and they haven't previously been presented to the forest owners as a set of well-defined rules.
The lack of a clear set of rules has tended to create some uncertainty among forest operations and during the auditing process. The new standard helps certified operations to understand precisely what is required from them and provides a more efficient auditing tool.
Operations running primary and secondary processing facilities that include inputs not originating from forests in their Forest Management certificate need to obtain a separate chain of custody certificate according to the full FSC chain of custody standard, FSC-STD-40-004 (version 2). For all other operations, the chain of custody system required is simple and therefore included in the scope of their forest management certificate.
