JOINT NGO statement on Mutual Recognition presented at the FAO-GTZ-ITTO Conference on 'Confidence Building Between Different Certification Schemes', Rome 19-20 February 2000

Forest  Certification  and  Mutual  Recognition:  The  Fundamentals

19 February 2001

The undersigned organizations are concerned about the wide disparities between different forest certification programs.  Thus, we are concerned that a number of programs are prematurely considering broad “Mutual Recognition” arrangements without sufficient analysis of these disparities. “Mutual Recognition” must be a comprehensive, rigorous, technical task - not a political exercise.  It must be based on equivalence, confidence, trust and credibility, and it must be acceptable to all stakeholders.  With this in mind, we wish to set forward some basic elements which we believe to be central to the current international debate over “Mutual Recognition”, and to building greater confidence and trust among certification programs and their supporters:

1.         Mutual Recognition means substantial equivalence of program components and outcomes among participants in a framework.  “Mutual Recognition” is a reciprocal arrangement under which one forest certification program or body recognizes and accepts all critical components of another program as being substantially equivalent to its own in scope, design, process, and output.  The quality of output (e.g., standards, accreditations, certification assessment procedures, forest management, logos and claims) is an essential element in determining equivalence.

2.         No Mutual Recognition framework can be stronger than its weakest member.  Under a “Mutual Recognition” framework, each certification program accepts the weakest component or standard of every other program as sufficient to meet its own requirements.  It is apparent that, under such a framework, what one program considers to be its strengths may be diminished by association with the related weaknesses of another program.  That liability extends to all programs under the framework.  Thus, the public, media, buyers and individual consumers must regard all programs within the framework as operating at the level of the weakest within it. 

3.         The credibility of the framework as a whole can never be any greater than the credibility of its weakest link.  The weaknesses of each member of a “Mutual Recognition” framework affect the credibility of the whole, and vice-versa.  The greater the number of programs associated with a single “Mutual Recognition” framework, the greater the challenge in maintaining the credibility not only of the whole, but of each program.

4.         No certification program is likely to intentionally sacrifice its credibility by accepting, as its own, the serious weaknesses of other programs.  Public credibility is the highest value of any certification program.  A certification program that takes pride in several of its own unique attributes, and considers them to be fundamental to its public identity and credibility, will be unlikely to either abandon or weaken those attributes or to formally associate itself (e.g., under a “Mutual Recognition” framework) with other programs that fail to have those attributes.  Maintaining a credible, high standard cannot be achieved by endorsing a low standard as equivalent.

5.         Equivalence cannot be externally imposed through an ill-fitting framework.  Equivalence between certification programs can be determined only after factual comparison of the specific elements of each program, and only after confidence and trust have been built between members and supporters of the individual programs.  Equivalence, therefore, cannot be externally imposed through a framework into which individual programs are forced to “fit”, or through a new set of criteria or conditions that ignore or obscure the fundamental differences between programs or distill them into generalizations.  Equivalence can only be built element by element, and output by output.