I

ndonesia has proposed that the European Union establish a common platform on sustainability to ease the flow of crude palm oil (CPO) exports into Europe.

The proposal was conveyed during a hearing with the EU Parliament in Brussels from March 17 to 18 ahead of the meeting of the Indonesia-EU working group on trade and investment that kicked off on Thursday.

Deputy Trade Minister Bayu Krisnamurthi said Thursday that the proposed common platform would be similar to the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Government and Trade (FLEGT) applied to timber, which directly recognized compliance of legally certified timber from Indonesia with EU law through a voluntary partnership agreement (VPA).

The scheme, called Vegetable Oil Sustainability Enforcement, Government and Trade (VOSEGT), will primarily concern the sustainability of palm oil production.

'€œUnder the platform, the EU would directly acknowledge the sustainability of certified palm oil from Indonesia,'€ Bayu said.

In another meeting involving palm oil consumer groups, Indonesia also requested that the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a multi-stakeholder palm oil body, create a program that acknowledged convergences among its mandatory and membership-based sustainable palm oil certification and Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) certification.

Under such a program, the RSPO would acknowledge palm oil certified under the ISPO as sustainable and vice versa, Bayu said, adding that the program would be feasible. Indonesia is slated to formally discuss the proposal at the RSPO Summit in June in London.

Indonesia, once the world'€™s biggest log exporter, has struggled to combat rampant illegal logging. By 2001, it banned all log exports and in 2003, it introduced a domestic timber legality verification system (SVLK) that applied to all timber producers in 2010. As one of the buyers that has raised concerns on illegal logging and timber trade across the world, the EU passed a timber regulation a few years ago demanding the purchase of only legally sourced timber.

Under the EU-Indonesia FLEGT-VPA, the EU acknowledged the legality of SVLK-licensed Indonesian timber and removed it from long tracking procedures, thereby cutting business time and costs as well as providing better access to the 28-member bloc market.

Similar to timber, palm oil, of which Indonesia is the world'€™s biggest producer, has long been blamed for destroying Indonesia'€™s vast tropical rainforests as oil palm plantations have expanded greatly.

In 2010, the government tried to address the concern of deforestation amid mounting pressure from big-scale buyers, such as Anglo-
Dutch multinational Unilever and Switzerland'€™s Néstle, which demanded Indonesia supply sustainable palm oil by developing its sustainability program, the mandatory ISPO.

However, questions still linger as to how to get the national program internationally acknowledged and obtain the same level of credibility as consumer-driven sustainable certification issued by the RSPO. At present, Indonesia'€™s sustainable palm oil accounts for 48 percent of the 8.2 million tons of palm oil certified by the RSPO, and with the figure, it could meet the entire Europe demand, according to Bayu.