Following three years of intensive negotiation with the EU, Indonesia remains reluctant to sign a voluntary accord to combat illegal timber products from being sold in EU member states.
Hadi Saryanto, Indonesia's chief delegate to the talks, said Indonesia would continue to focus on ensuring good governance in managing forests before signing the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA).
"We haven't set a deadline as to when we will sign the VPA," he added.
Hadi, who is also the director general of production forest management at the Forestry Ministry, told reporters at Tuesday's meeting between Indonesian and EU delegates that Indonesia needed to study the outcome of a similar EU-Ghana VPA.
The European Commission and Indonesia began VPA negotiations in January 2007.
Indonesia had previously promised to sign the VPA in January 2008.
The VPA is an EU licensing scheme to ensure all exported timber products entering EU member countries have been legally produced.
With 120 million hectares of rainforest, Indonesia has the world's third-largest forest area. The country exports about 33 percent of its timber products to EU markets annually.
Indonesia has long suffered from widespread illegal logging due in part to poor law enforcement.
A report by US-based NGO Human Rights Watch launched in Jakarta on Tuesday said the Indonesian government lost US$2 billion annually between 2003 and 2006 to illegal logging, corruption and mismanagement in the forestry sector.
The report also said more than half of all Indonesian timber was sourced illegally.
EU Ambassador Julian Wilson, who headed the EU delegation at the talks, said a lot of progress had been made on the VPA.
"The agreement can be passed as soon as possible if the political will is behind it," Wilson told a press conference at a two-day meeting Tuesday.
He said the implementation of the VPA would provide much benefit to Indonesia.
The EU is currently negotiating its VPAs with a number of countries, including China and Malaysia.
Experts have long suspected that most of Indonesia's illegal timber was bought by China and Malaysia, which then exported them as sawn timber and finished wood products to the US, Japan, and EU member countries.
The EU has proposed a new regulation, expected to be adopted in 2010, which will require EU buyers to implement procedures to minimize the risk of illegal timber being traded in the EU.
In the proposed regulation, timber imported from countries that had signed a VPA would be automatically considered legal.
Indonesia has a timber verification system but it remains unclear whether the system complies with EU standards.
The United States has also been intensifying regional dialogue with a number of Asian wood-exporting countries, including Indonesia, in an effort to combat illegal logging under the Lacey Act, which regulates the import and export of food products to and from the US.
Under the Lacey Act, any US citizen found to be importing or exporting illegally harvested plants or products to and from the US may be prosecuted.
- JP/Adianto P. Simamora
