By, Lely Puspita

Surabaya - at the Sheraton Hotel Surabaya, WWF-Indonesia in collaboration with TRAFFIC Southeast Asia has conducted training with theme of legality of exporting forest products to the European Union, Australia and the United States on November 7th, 2013. This event was attended by over fifty participants, who came from different sector, industrial forest company and exporters of forest products, as well as relevant organizations and governments, such as East Java Provincial Forest Service, Ministry of Forestry and Ministry of Trade of Republic Indonesia. During the full day training, the panelist delivered various regulations concerning the timber legality and also the procedure on how to export forest products in accordance with the regulation of each customer country.

The training officially opened by the Director of Export for Agriculture and Forestry Products, Nusa Eka, spoke about the development of Indonesia timber export which is increase 1.5% as per January period in 2013 as large as 6.7 billion, compared to the same period in 2012. Eka Nusa also expressed a hope that this event could increase social awareness on fair and legal trade on forest products, which also support the Indonesia economic development.

There are nine main materials given during the training, the regulation on TLAS (Timber Legality Assurance System) in Indonesia, introduction to the timber trade flow, introduction to international policies and agreement on timber trade such as CITES (The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, FLEGT (The Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade), US Lacey Act, EU Timber Regulation & Australian Act, Due care and Due Diligence ion carrying out legality, introduction of the GFTN (Global Forest & Trade Network) supply chain and the last but not least presentation was delivered by Rizal Bukhari from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which talked about governance and legality of forest management and timber trade.

Presentation on TLAS (Timber Legality Assurance System) presented by the Director of Forestry Business Development, Ministry of Forestry, Dwi Sudharto, explained more deeply about the current TLAS progress in Indonesia. TLVS as Indonesia basic on the Voluntary Partnership Agreement - The Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT-VPA) with the European Union which was recently signed on September, 30th 2013, will be formally implemented as mandatory regulation for all forest management units starting on January 2014.

These event which was held under the RAFT II program (Responsible Asia Forestry and Trade) aims to raise awareness from various stakeholder, especially industrial forest company and forest products exporters to get better understanding on various regulation both national and international regulation. By facilitating the knowledge sharing about international trade regulations such as EU Timber Regulation Timber, Australian Bill and U.S. Lacey Act, expected that Indonesian forest products companies become more confident to export their forest products to major market in the future.