KOTA KINABALU: A Malaysian firm has been given the go-ahead to develop a set of national standards that are acceptable to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a global organisation that promotes the responsible management of the world’s forests.
Jayashree Kanniah, the executive officer of the company, Forest Sustainability (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, disclosed that this approval was announced by Andre de Freitas, the Director General of FSC at the gala dinner that marked the opening of FSC’s week-long Sixth Triennial General Assembly here.
“This is indeed a step forward for us,” she said in an interview yesterday.
With this latest development, she said the company’s standard development working group, supported by co-drafters with technical expertise, would begin its task of drafting the Malaysian standards based on FSC’s generic standards.
This, she added, would bring together all the three chambers – social, environmental and economic – to draft a standardized document that everybody could refer to.
“We will bring our group together to start the drafting task. We have elected and nominated people sitting in each chamber, to come together to develop this.
“This process will go through a series of stake-holders consultations and once the final version (of the draft) has been made, it would be forwarded to the company’s board of directors for consent.” This will then go to the board of the FSC and they would decide and approve the standards and Malaysia shall have her national standards accepted.
“Actually, when the proposal was submitted to the FSC, we had outlined a time frame of activities that take at least by the end of next year when we should have the standards ready.”
Kanniah explained that Forest Sustainability (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd is not a certification body and neither does it represent any chamber.
“We are a neutral chamber. We want to bring FSC to Malaysia and now we are actively initiating this with FSC and progressing this for Malaysia. Our first step is actually developing the standards and getting approval for them.” She said the four-year old company has thus far received support from WWF-Malaysia and the Malaysian Nature Society (MNS).
Since its establishment in 2007, the WWF-Malaysia has served as secretariat for the activities of its board of directors who are serving as volunteers.
“At the same time, MNS provided the needs for our office to be registered. Starting in July, we are separated from WWF to run this independently.
“We are now run as an independent, non-biased and neutral organisation that is facilitating the three chambers.” She said the firm would follow FSC’s terminology and structures in its operations.
“The way FSC is doing is through consensus building, so this is how we would move forward.” Presently, she is the only full-time staff supported by Anthony Sebastian, chairman of the board and directors who had so far served as volunteers.
Henry Chok, the founder president of the Sabah Environmental Association (Sepa), serves as a director on its environmental chamber. There are no representatives from Sabah on its economic and social chambers yet.
“For the moment, we are looking into developing into the region where we will have wider stakeholders from Sabah, Sarawak and the Peninsular,” Kanniah stated.
Both Kanniah and Chok are participants at the FSC general assembly that came to a close this evening.