Headquartered in New York and active in more than 50 countries, one of the Rainforest Alliance’s many aims is to protect the world’s rainforests—and the species that thrive within them. The Alliance also works to improve the fortunes of people who depend on the rainforests for their livelihoods.

The Rainforest Alliance has been working with Gibson since 1996, when the corporation became the first musical instrument company to produce guitars using Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified wood. In fact, Gibson Chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz has been a committed member of the Rainforest Alliance's Board of Directors for many years, and in 2006, 42 percent of the wood bought by Gibson USA came from regions that were either FSC-certified or working toward such certification. In the next five years Gibson intends to increase that amount to at least 80 percent.

In the case of Honduras, the Rainforest Alliance is alleviating forestry-related problems with a program called TREES (Training, Research, Extension, Education, and Systems). The program is designed to create incentives for loggers to harvest wood in a manner that sustains the rainforests while at the same time reaping financial benefit for inhabitants of the region. In conjunction with the FSC, the Rainforest Alliance is rewarding forestry workers for harvesting wood in accordance with formally certified standards. One such logger recently told the weekly newspaper, Honduras This Week: “We used to throw everything on the ground, but now we pack up our trash and go back to pick up what we find that wasn’t ours. We replant after cutting, which we didn’t do before, and we don’t clear-cut a whole area. Things are going well for us. There’s no longer any reason to cut illegally.”

Representatives of the Rainforest Alliance have trained—and continue to train—workers in Honduras’s village sawmills to mill mahogany to Gibson’s specifications. Wood pieces that previously would have been discarded are now milled for guitar neck stock, and the yield from every mahogany tree is maximized. The Alliance works diligently to facilitate direct communication between Gibson and organized worker-cooperatives that are committed to the TREES program.

“When you’re certified, you can make business with any part of the world,” says Richard Woods, the vice president of one such cooperative, speaking to Honduras This Week. “You make better money because they pay better, and you get business with any company because they all, in Honduras too, want to buy certified wood.”

The “better money” Woods alludes to is in reference to the financial premium companies such as Gibson offer for wood that’s certified. Gibson routinely pays nearly four times the going rate for such wood in the world markets, which in effect erases the lucrative nature of the illegal mahogany trade. One could argue, however, that the additional cost isn’t a premium at all, but rather the true value of conducting business in a way that sustains an environment necessary to conduct business. Being a good steward—and lifting up formerly impoverished world citizens—is its own reward. In the long run, it makes good business sense as well.

“As these big players in the paper and musical instrument industries are showing, large companies are taking sustainability seriously and considering the long-term environmental, social, and economic implications of their sourcing strategies,” Rainforest Alliance Executive Director Tensie Whelan said. “Buying wood products from FSC-certified forestlands supports forestry operations that manage their land responsibly, conserves bio-diversity, and curbs deforestation.”

http://www.rainforest-alliance.org/