The wood industry aims to "green production"

​The wood industry is moving towards green production

According to the timber associations, producing legally sourced timber is a prerequisite for export. Besides, in order to protect forests better, it is necessary to change the habits of using wood products in the domestic market.

Towards green production

According to the Vietnam Timber and Forest Products Association (Viforest), the recent natural disaster in Central Vietnam is the result of human behavior with nature, including inappropriately exploiting natural forests. The habit of using natural wood, including precious and perennial natural wood, still exists in a large number of people. Therefore, in order to protect the forest, consumers need to change their tastes, pay more attention to raw materials of planted forest, thereby affecting the wood production industry. Most of the activities of enterprises belonging to the wood industry associations here are not the cause of deforestation and forest degradation. Because their products use plantation timber, wood imported from a low-risk source. Enterprises need to pay proper attention to the domestic market and unanimously support building a responsible wood industry, a sustainable forestry.

To demonstrate their role and join forces with the Government towards "green production", Viforest and the timber association Binh Duong, Dong Nai, Binh Dinh, Thanh Hoa and Ho Chi Minh City together with the Plywood Association, The Wood chip association signed a commitment to develop the Vietnamese wood industry in a sustainable direction, saying no to illegal timber. The aforementioned units also launched a Green Vietnam Fund with an initial capital contribution of 6.5 billion VND. This fund aims to fund environmental protection projects, afforestation and organizes events related to forest protection.

Build legal raw materials sources

Affected by the Covid-19 epidemic, the wood industry is still one of the five industries with export value achieving a good growth in the first 10 months of 2020. Specifically, during this period, wood products for export reached 9.6 billion USD, up 12.4% over the same period last year. It is expected that the target of 12.5 billion USD for the whole 2020 of Vietnam's wood industry can be completely achieved. Similar to the whole country, in Dong Nai, wood products currently ranked third in export growth in the 10 months of 2020 with a turnover of 1.3 billion USD, increased 6.75% over the same period.

According to enterprises, for exported timber, one of the prerequisites for bringing goods to other countries is the legal origin of the product. The reason is that European countries, the US - the main wood export markets of Vietnam (the US accounts for about 50%) attach great importance to this issue. If detecting violations, they will be sued and punished for trade very high, so almost no enterprises will violate.

With regard to timber exports, Vietnam fully implements the signed international commitments such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the Voluntary Partnership Agreement VPA/FLEGT to promote legal timber trade from Vietnam to the EU.

Dong Nai Wood and Handicraft Association (Dowa) always attaches great importance to wood originating. Dowa has also linked 100 companies to cooperate with each other to build a legal wood material market. Timber imported from all over the world to Dong Nai for sawing and processing to ensure the inspection papers in accordance with Vietnamese and international law.

Vi Quan