Governments have claimed to be dealing with illegal logging issues intensively over in the last four years and yet our evaluation shows that apart from significant improvements made by one or two countries, the overall performance by EU Member States was worse than last year.

In 2007 only 4 countries out of 27 countries scored at least 50% of total achievable scores: the UK followed by Austria, the Netherlands and Lithuania. None of the surveyed 26 EU governments + Switzerland however reached an acceptable 'green' score in 2007, as was also the case in 2006. In the previous two scorings at least one country, the UK, had reached that level.

For most countries their low scores are explained by their lack of activities at a national level to stop illegal timber trade such as through effective public procurement policies and national action plans. There is a stark lack of activity on these.

The governments mainly achieved points on scores which measured their attitudes on EU activities against illegal logging. Although support for EU action is laudable and needed, it is not enough to tackle the problem of illegal logging.

Some positive highlights:

• Notable is the improvement made by Austria who has doubled its comparable scores since 2006.


• 3 countries improved their comparable score since 2006 from a 'red' to a 'yellow' overall score: Finland, Lithuania and Sweden.


• Improvements in public procurement policy were made since 2006 by only Austria and Spain, while Romania, which took part in the survey for the first time this year have tightened up some of the rules in its public procurement in 2006. Only Denmark is able to show that its public procurement is having a positive effect on its timber imports, albeit in a very limited way.


• Countries which have assisted with the VPA process for the first time this year are Sweden, France, Lithuania, Portugal and Finland. Latvia and Germany continue to assist the VPA process to a limited extent, while the UK and the Netherlands remain the strongest supporters. Assistance is assessed across the following criteria: staff time; technical advice; utilising contacts in producer countries (e.g. through dialogue between national Ministers, embassy contacts, overseas development agency dialogue). Given the limited resources allocated to the FLEGT process by the EC in terms of staff capacity, national level assistance in this area is important. Over two thirds of the EU Member States provide no assistance whatsoever to the VPA negotiations which are the flagship of the EU FLEGT Action Plan.


• The only country that has already implemented a time-bound national action programme with clearly defined targets and monitoring on illegal logging is Austria.