Meeting the due diligence market legality requirements of the EU Timber regulation (EUTR) has been a challenge for timber traders EU-wide. For many, notably small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), it still is. But there’s help at hand in a new EU-funded SME training Project. Providing free education, tools and risk data, it will help SMEs make due diligence less a challenge, more the standard way of doing business – even a business opportunity.

The aim of this project is to develop risk analyses for soy, palm oil and cattle, commodities that are known to be directly associated with forest degradation in developing countries. In addition to the risk analyses, the project will also develop and make available user-friendly tools, so that industry members can strengthen their responsible sourcing of these commodities.

This project aims to take the large amounts of forest legality-related information that have been generated by Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) processes as well as other sources, and present it in a format that is easily understood by, and freely available to, those who need it to evaluate risk in timber product supply chains.

We conducted an analysis of existing practices that could be applied to FSC Forest Management certification in order to ensure that the FSC system is accessible to communities.

This project prepared small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to comply with the chain of custody requirements under the Sabah Timber Legality Assurance System. The project provided capacity building to 35 SMEs including provision of training, checklists and system development.