高知県檮原町森林組合におけるFSC森林認証への挑戦とその成功要因

Abstract

Forest certification is one of the epoch making challenge toward sustainable forest management among environmental groups, forest industry, and consumers of wood products today. After the UNCED in 1992, sustainable forest management became a world trend in forestry. Although many international and intergovernmental efforts have been carried out since then, forest certification movement in private sector must be the leading position among such variety of efforts. Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is one of the most unique forest certification system, in which environmentally sensitive groups and neutral people as well as timber companies are heavily involved. Yusuhara Forest Owners Cooperative (YFOC) in Kochi Prefecture has successfully approved by FSC as a forest resource manager of 2, 250 ha of their members forests in October, 2000. It was the second case to have FSC forest certification in Japan after Hayami Forest in Mie Prefecture. This paper describes the details of YFOC to get FSC certification, and analyzes factors of their success. In addition to their well organized infrastructure and hardwares such as forest road system, GIS data base, new sawmill, and high-tech forest machinery, human resources in the cooperative must be an important factor of their high performance of forest management. Three of young section chiefs are focused on, and how each of them enables YFOC to achieve the FSC requirements. It is concluded that the organizational unity of YFOC embodied by these three section chiefs was the key to get FSC forest certification.