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Fishing and Logging Policies

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, on bringing this issue before the House tonight. She gave us a powerful exposé of the extent of illegal activities in these areas and the need for reasonable, manageable resources to enforce the existing conservation measures. Each contribution tonight has added to the knowledge of this House and to the scope of the debate. There have been too many excellent contributions for me to comment on them all. Perhaps I can add my own experience briefly before I move on to the substance of the debate. I can imagine nothing quite as dramatic as the first time I flew over the west African rainforest and saw the trees stretching to the horizon for 360 degrees. Sadly, some 20 years later, when, as a parliamentarian, I retraced my steps, instead of unbroken rainforest from horizon to horizon, I saw that it is now patchy and there are areas of savannah, scrub and bush. It is no longer the virgin rainforest that I had seen in my formative years. I agree with the noble Baroness about the importance of fishing in a country such as Senegal, where there are literally tens of thousands of single-person fishing industries—I am talking of people who fish from canoes in the open sea and by which they sustain their families, provided that the factory ships have not been along the week before and scoured the sea of anything that swims. I agree with her entirely on the importance of that. I should declare an interest as I want to comment on some of the work of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. As a paid-up member, I suppose that qualifies as an interest. I am sure that the Minister will be aware of the development of the High Seas Task Force (HSTF), which was set up as a result of a call for action on illegal and unsustainable fishing at the world summit on sustainable development in 2002. Noble Lords may know that the task force was developed in 2004 and presented a final report, Closing the net: Stopping illegal fishing on the high seas, in March this year. A consultation workshop was held at Chatham House to discuss the UK action plan for implementing the recommendations of the task force. The UK action plan will comprise three strands, with the United Kingdom taking an international role in facilitating and promoting the adoption of the High Seas Task Force measures. The three strands are: first, taking a leadership and facilitation role for all HSTF measures for the next two years through our own co-ordination unit; secondly, undertaking work for specific measures; and, finally, taking action internally to implement the task force measures within the UK or overseas territory fleets or overseas territory waters. Although we are fairly early in the programme, it would be helpful if the Minister could provide us with an update and perhaps a progress report. Turning to the impact of illegal logging, or the sustainability of logging, the demand from consumer countries potentially helps to drive illegal logging activities in the producer countries. That fact has been recognised since the beginning of an international focus on illegal logging. In 1998, G8 countries agreed, as part of a G8 action programme on forests, first, to assess their internal measures, particularly public procurement policies, and then to aim to control illegal logging and international trade in illegally logged timber. In 2005, Ministers at the Forest Law Enforcement and Governance conference, in St Petersburg—where they get these titles from I do not know—came out with an important statement. They were,"““convinced that all countries that export and import forest products [including timber and timber products] have a shared responsibility [to undertake action] to eliminate illegal exploitation of forest resources and associated trade””." That is a very important statement. Governments can pursue a range of options to reduce their contribution to illegal logging overseas. They can try to exclude illegal products by setting up border mechanisms to prohibit imports, by using procurement policy to create protected markets for legal products only, and by using their own legal framework more aggressively to target importers of illegal products. That brings me to the concept of licensing. The immediate problem with licensing is how to distinguish between legal goods and illegal ones. Exporting and importing countries may not be aware that they are handling illegal products and, even if they are, often the standard shipping documentation is all too easy to doctor. The European Union has provided us with a solution: to establish a licensing system with partner countries. The heart of the EU action plan on Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) rests on the negotiation of voluntary partnership agreements with producer countries. The timber licensing system is similar, in effect, to systems already in place in international agreements such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) or the Kimberly Process, for example, on conflict diamonds. Unlike those, however, the licensing system is being built up through a series of bilateral agreements. Inevitably, there are a number of significant unknowns in the development of the FLEGT system. These important unknowns should be placed on the record. I hope that the Minister can give the Government’s view, and that there will be some progress and answers. The unknowns I am talking about include the number of countries that will sign up to voluntary partnership agreements and thereby join the scheme. I believe that preliminary discussions have been positive, but producer countries will need to be convinced that the benefits of the licensing system, which gives access to EU markets, will outweigh the costs of the process. Another unknown is the impact of the scheme. Is it possible that exporters in producer countries will prefer to avoid the EU market and simply send their products to alternative outlets such as China, which is now a major importer of timber? Another unknown is: how easy will it be to evade the scheme? The fact that some producer countries may not join the scheme—at least initially—provides a route through which illegally produced, and therefore unlicensed, products from the voluntary partnership agreement countries can enter the EU. The last unknown is how rapidly the scheme can evolve. Finally, I want to raise some points on the legality of logging, the timber importing process and the overlapping sustainability issues. First, on timber procurement, I think it is fair to say that the United Kingdom leads in the European Union in most respects, but we need evidence of how well it is being implemented by government purchasers. It excludes social criteria; for example, the rights of forest communities, as a component of sustainability, which seems odd. The Government have argued that that is because of the EU procurement rules, but other countries are doing that; in particular, the Netherlands, France and Denmark, so I do not see what our problem is here. The same policy of licensing needs to spread through to local government and our devolved administrations as soon as possible. I would like to know what the Government are doing to help that process. The Government are aware that we are doing a lot of good things in this country, but we have a problem that the majority of the EU countries are not following suit, and we need some action from countries such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, Sweden and Finland, which are major importers of timber. Finally, what action are the Government contemplating in working out how to plug the loopholes in the FLEGT timber licensing scheme?