An alliance on responsible timber production between Danish multinational DLH and Greenpeace has broken down over allegations by the firm that the non-governmental organization is not interested in making progress.
Timber company Dalhoff Larsen and Horneman had been in ‘thorough dialogue’ with Greenpeace over various issues connected with its supply chain in Africa, but has now severed its links after the NGO failed to take up an offer to visit suppliers in Liberia to verify that the company’s suppliers are not involved in illegal logging or connected with arms trafficking.
‘It would have been easier to discuss things on the ground, but they haven’t responded to that,’ said Erik Albrechtsen, forest supervisor. ‘It looks like they don’t want to talk to us.’
Albrechtsen said DLH, which has an annual turnover of €610million ($596m) and 1350 employees, was also disappointed that documents about alleged activities by DLH suppliers handed over by Greenpeace as part of the dialogue turned out to contain nothing new and had been seen by the company on many occasions before.
The break-up came last month when it says Greenpeace repeated ‘unfair’ allegations about the firm on its web site. The site accused DLH of ‘crimes against the planet’ relating to its connection with suppliers in Cameroon and Liberia. Although the material was taken off the site after a threat of legal action, relations between the two parties then broke down.
‘It’s a question of “don’t call us, we’ll call you”,’ said Albrechtsen. ‘It’s a shame because we would rather talk with them. We have a good dialogue with many NGOs, such as Amnesty, and co-operate with several of them, but I’m not sure Greenpeace really want to talk with us at all.’
In a separate statement, DLH said Greenpeace ‘seems to stick at nothing in order to profile its own organization.’
Greenpeace said it had not taken up the offer to go to Liberia because it feared for the safety of staff in an unstable area of Africa and because it did not believe DLH had shown any commitment to addressing concerns about the alleged links of one of its suppliers to arms smuggling.
‘They deal with all the worst players in these areas but have refused to do anything about that,’ it claimed, adding that DLH was one of the timber companies causing it the most concern.