Fiji Hardwood – Striving toward Forest Certification

Our General Manager, Mr Semi Dranibaka, talks about- “The importance of forest certification for Fiji Hardwood” in the video below.

He talked about how their preliminary audit reviewed was done by a U.S. international company and the need to work toward getting their mahogany products certified.

TRANSCRIPTION BELOW

Forest certification is very important. We know now that international markets need forest or certified products that are coming over. We know that all the markets in the European market, the Australian and New Zealand markets, the U.S. markets want certified timber.

We are trying very hard to get our mahogany products certified. We have an international organization that is auditing our forest and mostly what they want is that we need to protect the environment that we are planting. We need to have it to be sustainable.

We need to protect our land owning units and see they have the benefits. And also we would like to see that the work conditions, the workers are treated to standards. So all operations that are done has to be conforming to all the standards and the relevant laws before any product is sold overseas.

So this is very important for Fiji Harwood and it’s working towards forest certification. We had our preliminary audit reviewed by a U.S. international company that’s doing international forest certification. So we are working towards addressing those gaps because under forest certification we need to satisfy certain principles and criteria for forest certification.

So we are working towards that. We have some gaps and we need to address those gaps to be able to get certified.