Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a great pleasure and a satisfaction to welcome so many different stakeholders in forest certification.
GTZ is a development organisation engaged in supporting sustainable development. We consider forest certification not only as a market instrument but rather as an instrument to put the Rio agreements into practice. The Rio principles clearly state that sustainable development is possible only through co-operation and partnership.
This is why we have been supporting collaboration between certification initiatives from the beginning of our Forest Certification Project. Given there were different national schemes in our partner countries not affiliated to any international scheme, we thought mutual recognition must be a good idea. However, in the process of supporting mutual recognition efforts we learned that this is not a straightforward issue but quite complex and still ill defined. And it is an issue that requires a lot of trust between ,owners` and supporters of the different schemes. This is why we are co-hosting this seminar because we think that any form of sound and lasting co-operation has to be built on confidence amongst partners.
During these two days stakeholders with quite different positions and concerns will be discussing here. All of us have the same goal: to strengthen sustainable forest management. To approach this goal we will have to pass through a narrow path between superficial harmony and destructive hostility. I do hope that we will - with the help of our experienced moderator - manage to keep on track neither switching to the simplistic nor to the polemic side. We must remember that, if one group cannot follow our journey the goal of all of us is at risk.
I wish us two days of constructive and illuminating discussions.
Thank you.