In an effort to correct what they see as a U.S. Department of Agriculture oversight, U.S. senators Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), along with Congressmen Glenn "G.T." Thompson (R-Pa.) and Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), have introduced the Forest Products Fairness Act of 2013. The bill is intended to include forest products in the USDA's Federal Biobased Products Preferred Procurement Program (FB4P).
Since FB4P began as a result of the 2002 Farm Bill, products with as little as 25 percent bio-based material benefit from the program's support and promotion, while many 100 percent bio-based wood products do not, as they were determined to be "market mature." As a result, forest products were excluded from government procurement initiatives because they had "significant national market penetration on 1972," according to the programs glossary of terms.
"This is definitely a step in the right direction," said Hardwood Federation Executive Director Dana Lee Cole. "The fact that hardwood products-the original bio-based products-were being excluded from the USDA program simply because they've been around for a long time never made any sense to us."
