Barking up the wrong tree? Challenges To Implementing A Timber Legality Verification Scheme In Ghana

Abstract

In 2008, Ghana signed a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) with the European Agreement under the EU’s Forestry Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan. This Agreement was part of Ghana’s effort to curb widespread illegal logging and deforestation in the country. Under this legally binding agreement, Ghana agreed to undertake a national timber certification scheme—called a Legality Assurance System—under which it would verify the legality of timber exported to the European Community. Once Ghana fully implemented its pilot program, any timber exports from Ghana would require a FLEGT legality license, issued by a Ghanaian authority, to enter the European Union.

However, Ghana also pledged to apply the legality verification scheme to its entire domestic timber market, meaning that all domestically traded timber and non-EU timber exports would need to meet the same legality requirements. Since the end of VPA negotiations in 2008, Ghanaian authorities have made multiple predictions for when Ghana would begin issuing FLEGT licenses—first in 2012 and then in 2014. As of now, Ghana has yet to issue a FLEGT license and still has significant policy hurdles to overcome before it can fully rollout its pilot.

Ghana’s case calls to mind two questions: What are the policy challenges that have contributed to the delayed implementation of a national timber certification pilot program in Ghana? And what do these challenges tell us about the likely success and limitations of this scheme in overall forest management? This thesis attempts to answer these two questions using interviews with Ghanaian forestry stakeholders, analysis of the VPA framework, background research on Ghana’s forest sector, and comparisons with other countries implementing similar systems.

This thesis concludes that though Ghana has built significant capacity in its forestry sector under the VPA, the FLEGT legality verification scheme is a necessary but insufficient policy tool for addressing Ghana’s high rates of illegal logging. Besides the fact that the legality verification scheme is a narrow form of certification, in that it only focuses on supply chain legality, Ghana’s attempts to use the legality scheme to address timber on its domestic market have been largely unsuccessful.

The Ghanaian case study reveals that the following challenges raised during the VPA implementation process also reveal the policy limitations inherent in the FLEGT timber legality verification scheme: a deficiency of timber industry support and leadership in sustainable forest management initiatives, the absence of a centralized and coherent system to deal with illegal timber on the domestic market, and a lack of effective structures to manage non-timber industry drivers for deforestation.