The purpose of the visit of the Swiss specialist is to improve the skills of experts who carry out certification of products of Belarusian forestry institutions in accordance with PEFS requirements. Its main focus was on the details of standards common to all countries United by PEFS certification.
The foreign expert visited two forestry enterprises - Berezinsky and Chervensky, where he checked the entire production chain - from raw materials to finished products - for compliance with what the instruction requires. "I was able to personally assess how Belarus conducts an audit of compliance with PEFS standards in forestry. I was interested to see how our standards are met. First of all, he paid attention to the extent to which the auditor himself understands the details of the PEFS standard. I was satisfied with what I saw: there are no comments to your specialists, the work of auditors fully meets the requirements of PEFS standards," Johan Fliher said.
Forest certification is one of the activities of the Ministry of forestry, which contributes to increasing the export potential of the forest industry, the removal of technical barriers to international trade, as well as ensuring productivity and sustainability, increasing biological diversity in forests, minimizing the negative impact of forest production on the environment.
Forest certification is carried out in accordance with the requirements of the international scheme of Forest stewardship Council FSC in the national system of conformity recognized by the pan-European forest certification Board.
PEFS is a forest certification recognition program operating in 49 countries. It recognizes the sovereignty of national standards. At the moment, according to the scheme certified by the PEFC system of forest management and forest management more than 90 forestry of the Ministry of forestry on an area of about 8 million hectares.