From the forest to the consumer - GVces - Fundação Getulio Vargas

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Solutions that lead to legal timber
Approved in 2006, the Public Forest Management Law transferred the
responsibilities for licensing and control from the federal government to the
local government of Brazil’s nine Amazon states. Previously, it had been Ibama’s
responsibility to authorize management plans and control the flow of timber
and wood byproducts out of the forest. “Decentralization was a last minute
decision, there was no debate about its impacts and the minimum capabilities
needed by the states to take on the new responsibility,” said Greenpeace Amazônia
research coordinator, Marcelo Marquesini, in 2010. The law established
a new authorization system and defined actions to transfer capabilities from
federal to state entities. “Forest protection, however, is not usually a high priority
for local governments as they are historically tied to the political elite that
profit from the logging industry,” he said.
Brazil’s Amazon states were assigned key responsibilities for the region’s
future without having the resources and structure to effectively control logging
activities. When that happened, Brazil had not yet achieved an efficient
and safe system to control the low impact harvest of trees, inspect transport
and storage of timber, and combat illegal logging. With the transfer of responsibilities
to the states, the Ministry of the Environment established a working
group to implement the Forest Origin Document (DOF) – the system was built
hastily due to the transition process and the need to standardize procedures
among the states, and training had yet to be offered.
The state of Mato Grosso – which at that time reported the highest rate of
deforestation among Amazon states – pioneered the decentralization process
by adopting its own electronic system to control timber flows from the forest
to processing sites. The system represented an important improvement and was
in use also in the states of Rondônia and Pará by February 2011. However, the
system did not completely prevent fraud and soon a key question was raised:
how would states that chose the other controlling system recognize and control
documents issued by Mato Grosso’s system?