Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement Breaks Down

Little hope remains for the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement. Resolute Forest Products and all ENGOs withdraw from negotiations following May 18, 2013, the date on which the initial term of the three-year agreement was set to expire.

While there is a possibility that forest products industry companies and environmental groups will return to the table, for now, they seem to be at an impasse. For the breakdown of how the CBFA talks broke down, see Forest2Market's timeline of events.

We also recommend two interesting and easy-to-read related stories.

The first is Peter Foster's "Up the Boreal Creek without a Paddle," which appeared online at the Financial Post. In his article, Foster compared the CBFA to "the Monty Python knight who, having had all his limbs hacked off, declares that it's 'just a flesh wound.'"

An earlier article on the relationship between trouble in the CBFA negotiations and the long-standing feud between FSC and SFI certification schemes, Jon Entine's op-ed, "Forestry Labeling War Turns Ugly as Greenpeace Bungles Logging Industry Attack," in Forbes, is also worth reading. Entine, who works with the Genetic Literacy Project, points out that "The CBFA clearly stipulates that Canadian forest managers can certify their practices to certificate programs run by FSC or by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative and its ally, the Canadian Standards Association. That has rankled the extremist NGOs, like ForestEthics and Greenpeace, which advocated a more adversarial stance, convinced that the SFI and the Forest Products Association of Canada [were] secretly undermining the agreement. They registered their disapproval of the CBFA from the beginning and have been threatening to undermine it." (Thanks to McShan Lumber and the company's newsletter for bringing this story to our attention.)