AWARD-WINNING TRAINING SINCE 1995
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It is being touted as “SmartLogging” Certification for the Magnolia Region and its at your back-door. ATPA Executive Director Larry Boccarossa says it is important that the ATPA membership and Ark Pro Logger participants have a clear understanding that logger certification is knocking and the direction and form certification takes in the future greatly depends on who steps up to take the lead.

According to Boccarossa, the Rainforest Alliance-backed SmartWood, a leader in Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) forestland certification, has developed a third-party performance based audit and certification system for loggers called SmartLogging. A draft 12-month pilot project recently surfaced that would introduce SmartLogging certification of loggers in Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas and that project, says Boccarrossa, has raised some great concern. He and other logging association executives and several area loggers participated with American Logger Council Executive Vice President Danny Dructor on a conference call this past week to gain a better understanding of the project and its far-reaching implications.

“When I read the draft I saw some possible impacts on the ATPA membership, for participants in the Ark Pro Logger training initiative and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative in general,” says Boccarossa noting association leadership from ALC and Louisiana and Mississippi shared similar concerns.

“Basically we had many questions about the origins of this project as it seemed to come out of thin air,” says Boccarossa. “Who is pushing this project in the region, why weren’t our respective associations identified as stakeholders early in the project’s development, and why does this program seek to impose the standards of FSC certification as “ideal” rather than work to integrate standards and certification options within existing frameworks like SFI and Ark Pro Logger?” questions Boccarossa.

According to the draft project proposal, a start-up meeting was held to determine interest in the pilot program by all stakeholders, yet according to Boccarossa, ATPA nor loggers from Arkansas were invited to the table until last week, and his counterparts had only limited involvement in early discussions about this project.

“Any certification program for loggers should be logger-owned and logger controlled and not dictated to them from outside entities,” says Dructor, who emphasizes the American Loggers Council has developed a Master Logger Certification (MLC) program with these parameters in mind. “In addition, the success of any logger certification program must have measurable and realistic incentives in place for the loggers to keep such a program running,” he adds. While Dructor believes much of the proposed SmartLogging pilot project “is a mirror image” of the ALC’s Master Logger Certification program, “there is one major difference.”

The pilot project, he states, contains land management practices that are simply not appropriate for the region. The proposal, he points out, puts the onus on a logger to determine a private landowner’s land use history before logging with a provision, for example, that there can be no cutting on lands that were converted to pine plantations since 1994. “That certainly contradicts scientific evidence that forest management is in and of itself sound practice compared to other alternative land uses, whether it is a pine plantation or a mixed stands, says Boccarossa adding, “and it certainly flies in the face of our own organization’s support of private property rights and really teeters on the issue of trade and commerce restraint.”

Dructor believes ALC-developed Master Logger Certification is the program of choice as it is compatible with multiple forest certification programs including Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification and the voluntary Sustainable Forestry Initiative. “The fact that this pilot project is FSC-backed is not necessarily a reflection of what system is best for the forest or for the practice of forestry, but rather a reflection of competing politics,” says Dructor who adds that efforts in the last decade to discredit industry-backed programs like SFI or Master Logger Certification would have resulted in much more positive results on the ground had the focus been on collaboration. The fact that ATPA and loggers were not included in the development of the SmartLogging Magnolia project, though project investigators state it was mere oversight and miscommunication, “feeds the perception that SmartWood and FSC certification aren’t willing to set aside politics to attain the common goal we are all working toward – sustainable forestry,” says Dructor.

On a positive note, the ALC is hopeful that additional associations will look at implementing the Master Logger Certification program in template form adapted to work within the existing political and business frameworks within each state. The ATPA Board of Directors has approved an MLC template for implementation in Arkansas and “will now hasten our investigation of the financial and human resources needed to carry out 3rd-party certification of loggers in conjunction with and complimentary to the Ark Pro Logger training program and FSC and SFI accredited forestlands and companies,” says Boccarossa. Dructor is also hopeful that MLC will be supported nationally by both the AF&PA and its SFI participant member companies and the FSC certification program “as a necessary component in the chain of custody monitoring of wood fiber from the forest to the mill,” he says.

Rick Cantrell, Senior Director, Sustainable Forestry and Forest Policy for the American Forest & Paper Association stated, “AF&PA and the SFI program have been a strong proponent of logger and forester training programs and that will continue. The work of the SFI State Implementation Committees in developing and promoting logger and forester training program is a vital part of the SFI program and required in the SFI Standard. AF&PA is supportive of efforts to broaden the practices of sustainable forestry and programs like the SmartLogging idea may have merit in doing so in the future. It is important, however, that programs like SmartLogging include all stakeholders in the development of them--loggers, landowners, the industry and certification program representatives. The Sustainable Forestry Board, which owns the SFI Standard, has a task group looking at logger training and certification and they are aware of the SmartLogging program as well.”

The ATPA will continue to keep its members informed of the issue of Logger Certification and ongoing programmatic developments as they progress. Please visit our website regularly for updates at www.arkloggers.com.
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