Helveta wins ethical timber contract in Indonesia

Helveta, the information technology company that developed the CI WorldTM software for tracking timber assets in supply chains, has won the contract to enforce ethical principles in Indonesia's timber industry.

The company's system will be used for the EC-Indonesia FLEGT (Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade) support project, by which the European Union seeks to combat illegal logging and timber trading.

Measures proposed by the European Commission include improved governance in wood-producing countries and voluntary partnerships with them to ensure that only legally sourced timber enters the EU.

Indonesia introduced the FLEGT process after finding that illegal logging costs the country about $3.3billion (£1.66bn) a year in legal revenue that it would otherwise receive. The government also took into account its own calculations that forest degradation increased from an average of 1.9 million hectares a year during the 1985-1997 period to an annual average of 2.8 million hectares from 1997 to 2000.

The latest unpublished official figures indicate that forest degradation is continuing at more than a million hectares a year.

Since adopting FLEGT, Indonesia has become the first country to deploy a technology-based timber legality assurance scheme, and for the first time its legality assurance standard has been codified in software that automatically determines whether timber data comply with the country's forest law.

Pak Ratman Tasmin, FLEGT director, said: 'We hope this project will result in better control over the supply chain for wood products in Indonesia.'

If successfully implemented, the government of Indonesia will be able to trace back timber products to the forest areas where the logs were harvested and ensure that no illegally harvested logs can enter the supply chain.