My Lords, I wish to support Amendment 264ZA, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and Amendment 264A, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. As we know, the rate of deforestation on our planet is a scandal and an increasing threat to both our climate and the extent of our biodiversity. In some parts of the world, it is also a threat to the indigenous population who live in the forests, a denial of their fundamental human rights. Their habitat, their lives and their livelihood are often endangered by deforestation.
Amendment 264ZA, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, rightly seeks to ensure that if forest risk wood is imported, it has been felled only with the permission of the indigenous population. It is not enough just for local laws to be observed, which may be too permissive or open to manipulation by local interests; there must be safeguards for those most directly affected. Our laws cannot reach into those areas, but we can at least ensure that we do what is open to us to do in this country, which is to have appropriate checks in place for importers of forest risk material.
Amendment 264A, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has a similar purpose: to do what we can in this country to prevent exploitive deforestation. It would ensure a total prohibition, except in relation to indigenous people, on importing forest risk products from agricultural land which should never have been cleared in the first place, as trees should still be standing. The noble Baroness put forward powerful arguments in favour of her amendment, strongly supported just now by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, with his important phrase about retrospective validation. A forest which should never have been felled in the first place might get some kind of legal retrospective validation, but we need to ensure that that wood should still not be imported. For those reasons, I strongly support both those amendments.