Lesson 2: Adapt to grow or accept to stop playing?

As the market becomes more and more demanding and difficult

The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) officially entered the transition phase (from October 1, 2023). According to Ms. Pham Thi Ngoc Thuy - Director of the Office of Private Economic Development Research (Department IV, under the Prime Minister's Advisory Council for Administrative Procedure Reform) - this means that products exported to the EU market will be subject to certain "KPI" on emission regulations.

Vietnam has a lot of room to export wood and wood products.

If they fail, the business will have to pay tax, the tax here is the carbon tax, in other cases they will require the business to buy carbon certificates to offset the emissions that the business has emitted. Thus, the EU is the first trading area in the world to impose a price on carbon on imported goods.

However, not only the EU, according to Ms. Thuy, the United States is also drafting regulations that are considered to be more stringent than the CBAM regulations that the EU has put forth. “In terms of nature, it is a similar regulation, but the number of industries affected is much larger. There are even regulations that we believe have a huge impact on businesses,” Ms. Thuy shared, adding that other markets are stopping at the trend of encouraging green conversion.

Clearly, there is a global trend of green purchasing spreading from the EU to the US and other markets. The story of the wood industry will be similar to that of textiles, without green certifications, wood industry businesses will gradually be restricted in their trading and commercial transactions.

Mr. Nguyen Duy Minh - General Secretary of the Vietnam Logistics Services Association - said - the requirements for greening the supply chain process are very clear and impact the competitiveness and opportunities to receive orders of exporters, not at the level of "striving".

Textile industry and lessons for wood industry enterprises

By 2023, Bangladesh will have 153 LEED (energy and environmental design) certified factories, and 500 factories are currently applying for this certification.

Currently, the LEED standard is evaluated on six main factors including: materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, energy and atmosphere, water efficiency, sustainability aspects, innovation in operations and regional priorities...

Citing the example of the textile industry and a lesson for the wood industry, Ms. Pham Thi Ngoc Thuy said that over the past year, Bangladesh's green textile story has received a lot of attention because this has helped them win very large orders while Vietnamese textile enterprises have few orders.

“According to information from the Vietnamese diplomatic agency in the United States, Bangladesh's textile and garment industry grew by 54% in a very short period of time; the representative of the Vietnamese diplomatic agency in Canada said that at the international textile and garment fair, hundreds of Bangladeshi enterprises brought LEED certificates to the table and received many orders, while Vietnam only had a few enterprises participating and did not have these certificates in hand,” Ms. Thuy cited.

According to Ms. Thuy, the most important issue is still the awareness of the businesses themselves. If in 2022, according to the assessment and quick survey of Board IV, it shows that the awareness of businesses about emission reduction and green transformation is still very low.

And after more than a year of traveling, researching, and exploring, if we compare the three major industry groups: agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, manufacturing, and logistics, it shows that the agriculture, forestry, and fisheries group is moving faster than other models. There have been models that have been internationally assessed and granted carbon credit certificates such as the low-emission rice growing model, the low-emission coffee model, or the story of the shrimp industry.

In this low-emission agriculture, forestry and fishery sector, the wood industry is missing. For more than a year, the wood industry has only stopped at the state of seeing the story of new regulations, having concerns about challenges and having a sense of opportunity. However, the question is what we can do to overcome the challenges, what to do to take advantage of the opportunities, how to get carbon credits, there has been no concrete progress.

“Green” is to protect competitiveness, opportunities to maintain production and international sales.

According to economist Vo Tri Thanh, "green" and "digital" are the two most important words that businesses are pursuing if they want to adapt to the demands of the international market. If in the past, pursuing "greenness" was a trade-off of costs, now green is to protect competitiveness, the opportunity to maintain production and sell internationally.

“Green” is to protect competitiveness, opportunities to maintain production and international sales.

Along with the story of the wood industry, returning to the story of the textile industry, Ms. Pham Thi Ngoc Thuy said that Ho Guom Garment is a bright spot in the textile export picture when recording positive export growth results in the past year and having the right to choose partners. This is the result of the efforts of the enterprise itself in researching LEED standards and determination to implement.

The question is what should wood industry enterprises do to adapt to current regulations of the domestic and world markets as well as future forecasts? Mr. Vu Tan Phuong - Director of the Vietnam Forest Certification Office - commented that currently, all enterprises are at risk of causing emissions. In the current context, the pioneering enterprise will seize the opportunity first. Therefore, enterprises need to calculate in each stage of their production, in which, which stage has the ability to reduce emissions, it needs to be promoted from there such as improving input efficiency.

In fact, there are also wood industry enterprises that have grasped the information and proactively changed to adapt. Mr. Trinh Duc Kien - Deputy Director of Ke Go Company Limited - shared that, as a unit specializing in exporting goods to the EU market, in 2019 the enterprise invested in FSC forest certification.

Recently, there have been customers raising questions about the origin of wood as well as the level of emissions in the supply chain. The questions that businesses receive are: How does wood product production use electricity, is there any way to limit the use of electricity in production, what is the origin of the wood that businesses use or what is the carbon absorption capacity, etc.

The issues that customers care about force businesses to find ways to respond in addition to issues of price, quality, and design. Switching to using biomass fuel in production, proactively linking to invest in FSC-certified plantation forests, etc. are the ways that businesses are implementing.

Lesson 3: Overcoming difficulties in green transformation for the wood industry to accelerate

Source link: https://congthuong.vn/bai-2-thich-ung-de-phat-trien-hay-chap-nhan-dung-cuoc-choi-296926.html