Central African Republic turns to Helveta’s CI World technology to improve forest management operations and timber tracking
27 April 2010
Oxford, United Kingdom, April 27 2010: Helveta Ltd, the leading provider of asset management and supply chain monitoring technology for the forest sector, has announced that it is implementing an online traceability system in the Central African Republic (CAR) to track timber as it moves through the supply chain.
Helveta’s CI World technology will be piloted at the Forestière de Batalimo (IFB) concession to track logs from production and through to point of export in order to facilitate increased traceability. The system will be implemented over the next nine months and aims to demonstrate the benefits of improved transparency to the chain of custody of wood produced and exported by the IFB, as well as to pilot means to integrate corporate production and export monitoring systems.
Helveta is working closely with Bureau Veritas - Bivac (BV), a worldwide leader in conformity assessment and certification, which operates a “Tax Verification Program” on behalf of the CAR Government to insure the collection of export taxes for wood products. Bureau Veritas also promotes the “Origine Légale du Bois” (OLB) voluntary certification program which the IFB was first to achieve in CAR in 2006.
IFB requested the assistance of BV and Helveta in order to improve its internal processes under the “Innovative Timber Tracking System” program of the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO). Under this initiative, the IFB will be provided with ITTO financial assistance to develop an innovative timber tracking system using commercially available hardware and software rather than conventional paper based solutions. The system must contribute to the dissemination of information on volumes of tropical timber products tracked under innovative systems through a website developed for this purpose.
CI World will be used to load information relative to the production of wood harvested by the IFB in a pilot area and reconcile this information with the data gathered by BV at the time of export. This crucial link will therefore bridge the current gap between export monitoring activities and forest operations critical to a more complete traceability framework necessary under the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) currently under negotiations between the Central African Republic and the European Union.
“By working with Helveta, we will be able to establish better production reports and clearly link them to our export processes which can be complex, requiring timber to transit through Cameroon, therefore providing our customers better visibility to our supply chain,” explained Philippe Gaden, Managing Director of Forestière de Batalimo. “In addition, we will have a real-time view of our assets, which we hope will streamline our business operations.”
Implementing a system based on Helveta’s technology will demonstrate the flexibility of CI World as a tool that can meet the needs of both corporate management as well as national regulators in facilitating traceability and verification of legal origin. It will allow the IFB to load their production and shipment data for a pilot area into CI World by exporting their current management records to a central database. It will also bring together the IFB datasets with the export control data of Bureau Veritas, enabling production to export traceability for the resources under the pilot program. All the information will be available online in order to allow wider access to the information by various stakeholders.
Thierry Verdier, Managing Director of BV in CAR commented: “Being able to integrate our current control of export activities to overall forest control and monitoring will be an extremely important process for the Central African Republic administration over the next few years. This will allow the CAR to maintain its leadership in forest management”.
Patrick Newton, CEO of Helveta added: “Working with the Forestière de Batalimo and Bureau Veritas allows us to further extend our footprint across the Central Africa. Helveta has the only working end-to-end traceability system in the timber sector that meets the requirements of the ITTO’s Innovative Timber Tracking System initiative. More importantly the results which will be shared with various stakeholders in the CAR will raise awareness of Timber Legality Verification in light of the impending FLEGT negotiations between the CAR and European Union.”