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1996 also marked the end of the three year grant provided to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), by the government of Austria. This support, along with that of other donors, has been instrumental in helping establish the FSC as the international accreditation organisation for forest certification. This year, FSC members approved a Principle and Criteria for forest plantations. At the General Assembly held in Oaxaca, Mexico in June the members agreed to modify the statutes to give equal voting powers to the social, economic and environmental chambers. They also determined that further progress was needed in the following areas through the creation of working groups: social issues in FSC; certification of multiple sources, including small scale forest owners; and the examination of possibilities for certifying non-timber forest products. This consensus building among different stakeholders is a precondition for successful certification. In the Nordic countries small scale forest owners initially felt left out of the dialogue on certification, but after much informal contact and a search for better mutual understanding, the situation has improved. In Africa, funding for the creation of working groups has been difficult to find, but this year the European Commission provided resources through WWF-Belgium to support certification working groups in Cameroon, Gabon and Ghana. Some progress has also been made on averting the potential conflict between the performance-based forest certification promoted by FSC and environmental management systems certification (ISO 14001) proposed by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). At an ISO meeting in Rio de Janeiro in June it was confirmed that the ISO has no plans to develop a forest certification standard. A working group was, however, created to "describe informative reference material" on existing performance standards, including those of the FSC, which forest products' companies wishing to be certified to ISO 14001 could use. Equally importantly, the ISO has begun to recognise that it has insufficient safe-guards in place to prevent unscrupulous companies from using certification to ISO 14001 as a 'quasi-ecolabel' which would lead to consumer confusion. This is already beginning to happen in the area of quality management with the ISO 9000 series of standards for quality management. The ISO now plans to review its procedures for the control of claims. In October the Canadian Standards Association published its sustainable forest management standard. Although some improvements were made to the standard in the final stages, it is still unsatisfactory from an environmental viewpoint as it does not include specific performance requirements. It is not yet clear whether the Canadian forest industry will press ahead with the implementation of this standard, at the risk of an NGO backlash, or whether a dialogue will now begin on regional performance standards in Canada. Now that certification and the FSC are firmly established, WWF's focus for the future will be to ensure that the standards used for certification are of high technical quality and have been developed through a balanced, multi-stakeholder process. The quality of forest certification, even more than the quantity of forests certified, will be the real measure of success for WWF.
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