- The EU parliament and council is considering a 12-month delay to its deforestation-free products regulation, which will require exporters to prove that beef, soy, rubber and other harmful commodities aren’t sourced to deforested land.
- The law was supposed to go into effect January 1, 2025, but faced mounting pressure from exporting countries and the industrial agricultural sector.
- The 12-month delay could result in around 2,300 square kilometers (888 square miles) of deforestation and 49 megatons of greenhouse gas emissions, according to EU studies.
An ambitious anti-deforestation law in the EU could be delayed for at least a year following pressure from foreign governments and producers, who said they were struggling to meet upcoming deadlines for the new trade regulation.
The EU deforestation-free products regulation (EUDR) was scheduled to go into force on January 1, requiring exporters to prove that beef, soy, rubber and other harmful commodities weren’t sourced to deforested land. Now, a 12-month delay could leave forests exposed to an unchecked agricultural industry, critics said.
“It’s clear that the EU is giving a green light for deforestation for at least one more year,” João Gonçalves, Senior Director for Brazil at Mighty Earth, told Mongabay.
The EUDR entered into force the middle of last year but allowed an 18-month transition period that was originally scheduled to end in 2025, requiring exporters of cocoa, cattle, rubber, soy, wood, palm oil and coffee to demonstrate their products don’t come from land deforested after December 31, 2020. Exporters will have to provide a due diligence statement with geographic coordinates of the land and an explanation of how the information was gathered.
A “benchmarking system” will classify countries as low, standard or high risk for deforestation, determining how much due diligence a country needs to do before trading with the EU.
Many producers said the regulations were complicated and expensive. In countries like Brazil, cattle ranching is notoriously difficult to track, with falsified ear tags and transportation permits helping smuggle hundreds of thousands of cattle from illegally deforested land onto legal plots. In Malaysia and Indonesia, which produce over 80% of the world’s palm oil, the product moves through a complicated network of suppliers before being exported, making it hard to know where they truly came from.
“It is crucial that the European Commission and members states acknowledge that the set timeline is simply not feasible,” 28 European industry groups, including the European Timber Trade Federation and European Livestock and Meat Trading Union, said in a statement last month.
The EU initially resisted calls for a delay from Brazil, China, the US and numerous other countries, telling the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) committee on agriculture that it didn’t want to compromise “legal predictability for operators.”
But less than a week after the WTO meeting, the EU introduced a legislative proposal that, if approved, would move back the deadline one year for large companies and 18 months for small ones. That means industrial agricultural producers would have until December 2025 to prepare for the law and small producers would have until June 30, 2026.
The proposal was introduced by the European Commission and needs approval from the EU’s legislative branches, the European Parliament and Council of the EU. If passed, it could result in 2,300 square kilometers (888 square miles) of additional deforestation and 49 megatons of greenhouse gas emissions, according to EU studies.
“Given the EUDR’s novel character, the swift calendar and the variety of international stakeholders involved, the Commission considers that a 12-month additional time to phase in the system is a balanced solution to support operators around the world in securing a smooth implementation from the start,” the European Commission said in its announcement.
In recent months, exporting countries have complained that the EU’s benchmarking system wouldn’t be ready in time. It would have initially categorized every country as “standard risk,” forcing some countries that should be labeled “low risk” to meet more rigorous standards than necessary. Under the new proposal, a large majority of countries will now be classified as low risk when the law goes into effect.
Complaints also stemmed from the fact that the law would raise costs for small producers and push many of them out of the market because they didn’t have the technology to meet traceability standards.
Observers said it was a legitimate concern but also an exaggeration meant to help the case for a last-minute postponement. In countries like Brazil, there are already government programs being developed to help small meat producers manage their traceability requirements. In Ghana and the Ivory Coast, civil society groups said small cocoa producers had been working to meet the January 1 deadline.
“There’s a cynical effort on the part of big companies and governments that are in cahoots and very much working closely with larger, more powerful actors,” said Christian Poirier, program director for Amazon Watch. “…[They’re] using small holders as a rationale to try to duck their responsibilities to zero deforestation in their supply chain.”
Conservation groups around the world expressed frustration at the lobbying power of industrial agriculture companies as well as major exporting countries, noting that Austrian agriculture minister Norbert Totschnig had been instrumental in the delay because of his country’s forestry exports. Earlier this year, Austria led a call from 20 EU countries to rethink EUDR implementation.
Critics of the delay also said it unfairly punishes producers who had been working hard to prepare for the January 1 deadline while letting the most irresponsible producers off the hook for another year, potentially resulting in rapid expansion of the agricultural frontier in places like the Amazon Rainforest.
“This is really bad news for companies that have invested in sustainability,” said Klervi Le Guenic, a campaign manager at Canopée, a French NGO. “It also sends a signal to companies that haven’t been working on sustainability, because it shows that lobbying works more than actually changing their supply chains.”
The delay could also allow new rounds of negotiations about the law, resulting in a weaker, simpler version, critics said. It could undermine the EU’s credibility and allow exporting countries to push back on future regulations. However, the EU denied that the law would change moving forward.
“The extension proposal in no way puts into question the objectives or the substance of the law, as agreed by the EU co-legislators,” it said.
Banner image: Fires burn on land deforested for agriculture near Wawi Indigenous Territory in the Amazon. Image by Kamikia Kĩsêdjê.
FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
See related from this reporter:
China accepts U.N. recommendations to improve environmental conflicts in Latin America