As I expected, there's nothing unusual about the SVG, and on my system it is shown with correct kerning both in 0.43 and current svn. I can only speculate that something is wrong on your system with either the font, or the freetype/pango installation. Inkscape takes the kerning information from Pango, and there's currently no switch to turn kerning off. So if there's no kerning, most likely Pango provides none. Try upgrading Pango, running in a different locale, or using other fonts. If nothing helps, file a bug with screenshots, SVG, and very detailed info on your platform and all used libs.
Richard, do you have any insights on why this might happen?
No, I have no idea why it works for you Bulia. There's no code in Inkscape to do automatic kerning.
Pango requires you to call pango_fc_font_kern_glyphs() to do the kerning, presumably so that applications can implement the 'only kern above x pt' feature. It's not difficult, we just don't do it. Add a feature request.
The only thing I can think that might be happening is that your distro has a specially patched version of Pango which does the kerning without being asked. Slightly unusual, but not inconceivable.
Richard.