According to Eurobarometer WWF (www.wwf.org.uk / barometer), Spain France, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia have not yet developed national laws that allow them to regulate and ensure the legality of timber sold on the European market. The Director of the European Commission, Karl Falkenberg, a few weeks ago threatened to take legal action against the governments of the Member States to fulfil their obligations.
This initiative, carried out during the first half of 2014 through the competent authorities on the part of the 28 Member States -including Switzerland and Norway- also identifies the Member States that have adopted national laws sufficiently robust to review the legality of wood and those that have established dissuasive sanctions against those who break the rules. Among the list of these "students applied" are countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Cyprus, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Estonia, Finland, Portugal, Slovenia, the Netherlands and the UK. The remaining countries have developed laws, but the system of sanctions and controls on operators are insufficient to ensure proper implementation of the regulation.
This information supplements the analysis conducted by the European Commission (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/forests/pdf/scoreboard.pdf) and confirms the poor performance of the Spanish government. The analysis by WWF provides more comprehensive information on the status of implementation of regulation in different countries information. In the Spanish case, this information cannot be offered as Directorate General of Rural Development and Forest Policy MAGRAMA competent authority in the matter, decided not to participate in the initiative of WWF, thus violating the provisions of the Convention Aarhus on access to environmental information.
Illegal logging, understood as the use, processing, transport and trade of timber in violation of national laws of the countries of origin, causing devastating environmental, social and economic effects. This activity creates unfair competition for those European companies that want to develop their activities in the framework of the law. It represents 30% of world trade in wood and contributes over 50% to deforestation in tropical regions such as Central Africa, the Amazon and Southeast Asia. Illegal timber harvesting causes losses of up to 7,000 million euros per year, increases emissions of greenhouse gases and threatens the livelihoods of local communities.
Enrique Segovia, Conservation Director of WWF, said that "the Spanish government can not take lightly the issue and derails the effort that other countries are doing to put an end to a problem whose magnitude is widely acknowledged by the EU. "The Rules of the timber trade no avail and will remain complicit development of this criminal activity, if an efficient implementation by all countries is not achieved," he adds.
The European Commission estimated that in 2011 35% (37,800 million euros) of world trade in wood products passed the EU. Despite the difficulty of calculating what percentage of that volume corresponds to illegal activities, it is clear that the EU is an important export market for countries where levels of illegality and low governance in the forestry sector are worrying.
