Controversial sources: New guidance from Transparency International
29 October 2007
Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) is the key information source for both the PEFC and FSC system when evaluating the risk of procuring illegal wood from a country. The recently released CPI 2007 shows that corruption is widespread in Russia and many Eastern Europe countries, but also some old EU countries like Italy and Greece have significant corruption problems.
The CPI 2007 register ranks 180 countries. In the system, corruption is classified on a scale from 1 to 10, in which a higher figure means less corruption. According to FSC and ASI (Accreditation Service International) countries with a CPI index below 5 can not be considered as “low risk areas” with respect to controlled wood certification. This means that there is a requirement to conduct field verification to control that wood purchased in these countries does not originate from illegal harvesting.
The average CPI figures for Russia, almost all Eastern European countries and some of the South European countries are below 5. Among Eastern European countries, Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic are the only exceptions.
The CPI is used by PEFC certified companies performing risk assessment according to annex 4, appendix 7 of the PEFC Technical Document and by FSC certified companies according to Annex 2 of the latest version of the FSC’s Controlled Wood Standards (FSC-STD-40-005 V2.1). Both standards specifically refer to the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) published by Transparency International.
Read more
You can find more information about the CPI and view the latest figures at www.transparency.org. A map of the current CPI for all countries can be seen here.
More information about controlled wood certification and controversial sources is available at NEPCon’s website: www.nepcon.net, PEFC’s website www.pefc.org and on FSC’s website www.fsc.org.
|
