Jakarta, 12/9 (BISNIS INDONESIA): The gov­ern­ment will endorse the Wood Legal­ity Ver­i­fi­ca­tion Sys­tem (WLVS) in early 2009. The Work­ing Team of WLVS Devel­op­ment and For­mu­la­tion has sub­mit­ted the final draft in early Feb­ru­ary 2007.

“We hope that the reg­u­la­tion can be imple­mented in early 2009,” said Hadi Pasaribu, the Direc­tor Gen­eral of BPK of Forestry Depart­ment in Jakarta, yes­ter­day.
Accord­ing to Pasaribu, it is very impor­tant to have such insti­tu­tion to put sus­tain­able for­est man­age­ment prac­tices to the test and to exam­ine the com­pli­ance of the prac­tices with the inter­na­tional cer­ti­fi­ca­tion standard.

He added that the insti­tu­tion was not estab­lished due to the pres­sure received from other coun­tries, as stated in the agree­ments with EU or other countries.

The Wood Legal­ity Ver­i­fi­ca­tion Stan­dard sets the legal­ity sta­tus of wood prod­ucts. The reg­u­la­tion will be endorsed through a mutual com­mu­niqué among the Min­istry of Forestry, trade and industry.

Hadi Daryanto, the BPK Sec­re­tary Gen­eral of Forestry Depart­ment, stated that WLVS acts as an interim exten­sion of the soon to be dis­missed Wood Indus­try Revi­tal­iza­tion Body (BRIK).

“We are still wait­ing for inputs from var­i­ous sec­tors such as the gov­ern­ment, asso­ci­a­tion, NGO or uni­ver­sity to deter­mine the actual form of the insti­tu­tion”, he added. In addi­tion to act inde­pen­dently, the WLVS exe­cut­ing insti­tu­tion will also per­form endorse­ment, mon­i­tor­ing activ­ity and pro­vide license.

High Cost
How­ever, the Indone­sian Wood Busi­ness Panel (APKINDO) voice their advice for the WLVS not to make the red tape even more complicated.

“We are con­cerned that WLVS could make the red tape even more com­pli­cated. This sit­u­a­tion may lead to a high cost econ­omy sys­tem”, said Rubianto, APKINDO spokesman, dur­ing the final pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on Wood Legal­ity Ver­i­fi­ca­tion Sys­tem, held by Indone­sian Eco­la­bel­ing Insti­tute (LEI) on Wednesday.

APKINDO sug­gest that there should not be dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions of WLVS, espe­cially by local author­i­ties,. “This will make the sys­tem more com­pli­cated”, said Rubianto