Anne Salmond

Last week I attended the annual conference of the Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand, where a representative of the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) in Bonn spoke about her organisation. …Given the number of raw logs that leave Tairawhiti, the refusal of some FSC-registered forestry companies to support local processing, breaches of resource consents, endless complaints about severe damage to the roading network and to waterways, coasts and harbours from sediment and slash, there seems to be a radical disjunction between FSC theory and practice in our region. In particular, the expectation that local ratepayers (many of whom live on low incomes) should heavily subsidise forestry companies by paying for damage to the roading network.