Beyond legality: Ghana’s Voluntary Partnership Agreement and sustainability
date: 31/05/2022
Sustainable development has three pillars: economic viability, environmental protection, and social equity. If one of these pillars is unstable or missing, then a society cannot thrive.
Forests contribute to all three pillars of sustainable development. They provide jobs for people and revenue for governments, contribute to environmental protection by supplying clean air and water and by fighting climate change, and they generate social benefits, including through the products that households rely on for their subsistence.
These three pillars do not always receive equal focus. In Ghana however, the implementation of a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) with the European Union has reinforced the forest sector’s contribution to each of the three pillars. The Agreement’s aim is to improve forest governance, address illegal logging and promote trade in legal timber products. The VPA’s impacts have gone way beyond the legality of the timber traded by Ghana.