(Jakarta, June 20 2008): The dis­cus­sion on Ver­i­fied legal Ori­gin (VLO), also known as Legal Ori­gin Ver­i­fi­ca­tion (LOV), can not be sep­a­rated to the State’s fail­ure in pre­vent­ing the ever increas­ing ille­gal log­ging activ­i­ties dur­ing the post-reformation era. The above fact has led to stricter Indone­sian wood legal­ity requirements.

The idea of legal­ity stan­dard is ini­ti­ated by accred­i­ta­tion and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion at inter­na­tional level to speed up the slow pace of sus­tain­able for­est cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process and the slow devel­op­ment of com­pa­nies pro­duc­ing trop­i­cal for­est prod­ucts which only reaches the rate of 6%. Although believed as neces­sity, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is a prac­ti­cal and real­is­tic way to ver­ify the legal­ity ori­gin of woods. Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is also a trust­wor­thy and can be accepted by the mar­ket. The For­est Stew­ard­ship Coun­cil describe the above con­di­tion by cre­at­ing the term of “Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is not Enough”.

Inter­na­tional com­mu­nity began to take ille­gal log­ging activ­ity into account since late 90s. It is an impor­tant com­po­nent in G8 Action Plan of For­est, and become the main issue in the FLGT Con­fer­ence coor­di­nated by World Bank in Bali Sep­tem­ber 2001 and in Africa (Yaounde, Octo­ber 2003)

One of the deci­sions stated that a firm action needs to be con­ducted, includ­ing per­form­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive works between intra and inter coun­try author­i­ties to pre­vent ille­gal woods dis­tri­b­u­tion and at the same time to explore ways to elim­i­nate activ­i­ties indi­cated as ille­gal woods har­vest­ing. Based on the FLGT Action Plan, a sys­tem is required to assess wood legal­ity the pro­ducer coun­tries must com­ply with as required by the exporter coun­tries (EU). The assess­ment stan­dard must take other inter­na­tional reg­u­la­tions into account such as CITES. CITES must be referred for license granting.

Based on the FLEGT result in Bali, the British gov­ern­ment intends to have a bilat­eral agree­ment with Indone­sia. On April 2002 a Memu­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing between the two gov­ern­ments was signed. The MoU con­sists of sev­eral key ele­ments such as: per­form­ing key iden­ti­fi­ca­tions on the leg­isla­tive body and multi stake­holder con­sul­ta­tion formed to pro­vide sup­port to bat­tle ille­gal log­ging activities.

Quot­ing Daru Asy­carya, the importer coun­tries are at the moment divided into two main­streams of thoughts: 1) rely the legal­ity sta­tus of the woods on the reg­u­la­tion imposed in the coun­try of ori­gin. Unfor­tu­nately the legal sta­tus stan­dard for one coun­try is dif­fer­ent to other coun­tries. Thus, it is dif­fi­cult to imple­ment this approach at field level. For instance, even neigh­bor­ing coun­tries like Indone­sia and Malaysia have dif­fer­ent pol­icy on wood legal sta­tus. 2) a more mod­er­ate view, sev­eral pro­ducer coun­tries does not really care about the reg­u­la­tion (on wood legal­ity) imposed in their own coun­tries as long as the UE coun­tries accept their prod­ucts. This leads to a vio­la­tion of com­mit­ment to sup­port the use of woods orig­i­nated from a sus­tain­able resource.

The EU, as importer coun­tries, is more inter­ested in the first main­stream of tought. Through FLEGT, the EU has final­ized the FLEGT Action Plan. The Action Plan focuses on the bilat­eral agree­ments between EU and the pro­ducer coun­tries. The bilat­eral agree­ment requires all pro­ducer coun­tries to issue legal­ity per­mit for all wood prod­ucts exported to EU. This is based on the dec­la­ra­tion made in Bali and The Hague of which stat­ing that sus­tain­able prod­uct demand is a high pri­or­ity in the politic agenda. Euro­pean coun­tries requir­ing the green pro­cure­ment are: UK, Den­mark, Hol­land, France, Ger­man, and Swe­den. At the moment FLEGT rec­om­mends EU to encour­age its coun­try mem­ber gov­ern­ments to sup­port ECAs’ (Export Credit Agen­cies) func­tion in per­form­ing detailed exam­i­na­tions on the legal­ity sta­tus of the for­est resources man­age­ment costumers.

Legal Def­i­n­i­tion
Daru added, prior to LOV sys­tem devel­op­ment, the most impor­tant ques­tion to answer is: ”How to define legal­ity in the con­text of curn­ing ille­gal tim­ber ? ”. If the ques­tion is answered, there will be three steps to per­form wood ver­i­fi­ca­tion:
1. Legal,
2. Legal and imple­ment­ing a pro­gram to achieve sus­taini­bil­ity
3. Legal and sus­tain­able (SFM Certification).

“The prin­ci­ple of legal can be imple­mented based on: auditable legal­ity cri­te­ria, describ­ing national rules and reg­u­la­tions or inter­na­tion­ally accepted prin­ci­ples and acknowl­edged by stake­hold­ers,” said Antoine de La Rochefordiere

Tau­fiq Alimi, the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Indone­sian Eco­la­bel­ing Insti­tute con­firmed, “The legal­ity def­i­n­i­tion must lead to sus­tain­abil­ity, not just state­ment and legal evidence.”

The sus­tain­abil­ity prin­ci­ple means to guar­an­tee the sus­tain­abil­ity of pro­duc­tion func­tions such as eco­log­i­cal and econ­omy func­tions. In this con­text, woods orig­i­nated from wood pro­cess­ing indus­try which does not sup­port sus­tain­abil­ity prin­ci­ples can not be cat­e­go­rized as legal.

“It needs to be noted that, in real­ity, Legal Ori­gin Ver­i­fi­ca­tion (LOV) is not lim­ited to the indus­trial sec­tor. The Sus­tain­able For­est Man­age­ment con­text in LOV– in the man­age­ment unit– needs to be imple­mented through Legal Har­vest­ing Com­pli­ance. LHC must taken sev­eral cri­te­ria into account such as Chain of Cus­tody. And also sus­tain­able har­vest reg­u­la­tion and land use legal status.

The arti­cle is down­loaded from Wood­Biz June 2008 Edition.