Seven representatives of the tropical timber trade, under the banner of the ITTC’s Trade Advisory Group (TAG), and eight representatives of civil-society organizations within the Council’s Civil Society Advisory Group (CSAG) participated in a Workshop on Illegal Logging and Illegal Trade during ITTC-36 on 19-20 July 2004 in Interlaken, Switzerland.

The results of the workshop were presented to ITTC-36 in Plenary on 22 July.
The workshop report indicates that the TAG and CSAG agreed that illegal logging and illegal trade are major concerns. Participants recommended that additional support be given to ITTO’s existing initiatives on trade statistics’ discrepancies and that country-level projects be encouraged to promote transparency in the tropical timber trade and access to information. In addition, workshop participants recommended that the ITTO should: conduct an international conference on the transportation of timber products, involving representatives of financial institutions, customs, shipping, and transport sectors, with the view to identifying weaknesses that have allowed for illegal trade; conduct an international conference on indigenous and other community forestry, forest tenure, policy and other regulatory barriers to management and trade, and their relationships to illegal logging and illegal trade; and strengthen and expand the ITTO project window to finance private-sector/civil society partnerships to advance sustainable and legal forest management and trade.
For more information, see the ITTO report of the meeting, the ENB coverage of the presentation and the ENB summary of the presentation to ITTC-36 Plenary.