T

he European Union (EU) has requested a rescheduling of its endorsement of the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA), which would regulate the import of Indonesian timber and timber products into the EU next year, an Indonesian official has said.

An official with the Forestry Ministry, Agus Harsito, who led the Indonesian delegation in the meeting with the EU representatives over the weekend in Brussels, Belgium, said that his counterparts had asked for the VPA signing to be postponed to February next year.

The postponement will possibly lead to delays of several months for Indonesian timber products until after the EU implements its new timber regulations slated for March next year.

“This is unacceptable because previously they [the EU delegation] said that the VPA signing would take place no later than this November,” Agus said in a media briefing in Jakarta on Tuesday. In May 2011, Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan and EU Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht concluded the VPA, a deal on the legal trade of timber products.

Under the deal, Indonesia, which is the first country in Asia to finalize the deal with the EU, will be subject to due diligence conducted by buyer countries to validate the legality of its timber and wood products.

The VPA will allow Indonesian timber and timber products to enter EU countries, as the VPA is recognized by the new EU Timber Regulation, slated to take effect in March 2013.

“However, if the EU decides to delay the VPA signing to next February, we can only start exporting our legally certified timber and timber products in July next year because they [the EU] will need further months for the ratification process to implement the scheme,” said Agus.

Indonesia, according to Agus, has been working to complete its timber-legality verification system, or SLVK, which was introduced in 2010 as part of the move to curb rampant illegal logging in the country.

The SVLK is mandatory and has been applied in industrial forest concessions (HTI), production forest concessions (HPH) and community plantation forests (HTR).

Under the scheme, which the ministry expected to be effective in January next year, companies that fail to show SLVK certificates will be banned from shipping their timber and timber products abroad.

In the first half of this year, out of around 500 such companies, 210, comprising producers of timber and wood-based items and operating on more than 6,000 hectares of land, were already SLVK-certified.

Separately, the deputy head of the EU delegation to Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam and ASEAN, Colin Crooks, confirmed that the EU was still working on the VPA, adding that the EU was “really pleased by the progress Indonesia was making in the SLVK system”.

“Nothing has been pushed back, there has not been a particular date for the signing of the VPA. We are really keen to do this as soon as we can,” he told The Jakarta Post over the phone.

When asked about when the EU would sign the VPA, Crooks said that it was “likely to be signed next year” without giving a specific schedule.

Crooks said that both the Indonesian Foreign Ministry and the EU delegation had agreed to highlight both the VPA and the SVLK matter during a state visit of the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in Bali this November.

EU countries import US$1.2 billion worth of timber and paper from Indonesia annually, which is equal to 15 percent of the latter’s export sales. (asa)