BFC for sustainability in the timber industry
2021-08-04
The Borneo Forest Cooperative or BFC was founded in 2009 by Sabah Softwoods Bhd and Asian Forestry Company (Sabah) Sdn Bhd in collaboration with Boden and Associates Ltd.
The founding partners moved to establish a cooperative group and a set of principles under which companies could work together, as they recognised that a successful and sustainable future for Borneo’s timber industry resides ultimately in the productivity and quality of its plantations.
The goal of BFC is for the members to participate in and share data and results from trials, work together as a unit to derive information from replicated experiments, to tackle critical challenges facing the plantation forest industry through structured and cooperative research, to provide redundancy and depth to all research work and established trials by duplication across company sites, to seek guidance from the world’s foremost experts in forest research for all work undertaken by the Cooperative,and to train a new generation of technical foresters ready to make Sabah’s plantation future a success .
Education and sharing of knowledge is also a fundamental principle of BFC. Some events held by the BFC include pest and disease, biosecurity management, statistical analysis, hybridization, plant propagation, tree nutrition, silviculture and nursery workshops which members from Forest Solutions routinely support and attend.
Forest Solutions & AFCS plays an important role in this group by participating in any events held by the BFC, implementing trials based on the annual BFC research program, providing data and other relevant research report to the BFC coordinators, sharing findings from research trials during the BFC annual meeting, collaborating with other BFC members to standardise research protocols and to share information where necessary.
Today, the BFC has evolved into a Malaysian registered company, BFC Research and Development Sdn Bhd, with 5 members representing 150,000ha of plantations across Borneo, over 35 trials replicated across all member companies, and will continue to collaborate as a unit to improve sustainable forestry throughout these plantations.
