Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA)

The EU FLEGT Action Plan recognises that, as a significant consumer of wood products, the EU shares responsibility with timber-producing countries to tackle illegal logging and its associated trade. However, there is currently no practical mechanism for identifying and excluding illegal timber from the EU market. The FLEGT Action Plan therefore proposes the development of Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) between the EU and individual timber-producing countries (FLEGT Partner Countries). These agreements are designed ultimately to eliminate illegally-produced timber from a Partner Country’s international and domestic trade.

A VPA is a binding agreement between the EU and a Partner Country by which the EU and the Partner Country undertake to work together to support the aims of the FLEGT Action Plan and to implement a timber licensing scheme. To enable this, a new European Regulation on the implementation of the FLEGT licensing scheme has been adopted.

VPAs aim to contribute to timber-producing countries'commitments to promote sustainable forest management by supporting improvement in forest law enforcement and governance. One element common to all agreements will be that Partner Countries have, or be committed to developing, credible legal and administrative structures and technical systems to verify that timber is produced in accordance with national laws. This implies:

• A commitment to ensure that the applicable forest law is consistent, understandable and enforceable and promotes sustainable forest management;
• Developing technical and administrative systems to monitor logging operations and identify and track timber from the point of harvest to the market or point of export;
• A commitment to improve transparency and accountability in forest governance;
• Building checks and balances into the tracking and licensing system, including the implementation of an independent monitoring system;
• Developing procedures to licence the export of legally harvested timber.
  

For more details on FLEGT, VPAs and the design and implementation in Ghana and Indonesia, see the following sub-pages.

For a quick view on the FLEGT/VPA design process, please consult the seven Flegt Briefing Notes (2007).

The IoI? Project argues that the VPA as trade agreement may underestimate the negative impact on livelihoods of forest dependent communities, and searches for governance mechanisms to mitigate these implications.