Good morning,
Once touted as a symbol of the EU’s commitment to sustainable and good business, the anti-deforestation regulation (EUDR) is now in the strange position of having been a hugely popular law just a couple of years ago that can barely muster any influential allies now that it is on the brink of being implemented.
The EU’s environment commissioner Jessika Roswall formally requested a second one-year delay to the law’s implementation on Tuesday (23 September). That will almost certainly be accepted. The main questions are whether the EUDR will be watered down further, or if it will ever come into force.
The commission insists that the problem lies in an IT system that risks being overwhelmed by around one billion due diligence statements per year, ten times more than it originally expected.
It’s not – at least to this reporter who has heard plenty of excuses from politicians – the most convincing of arguments.
The EUDR is certainly a well-intentioned law. It aims to ensure that the trade in key commodities like cocoa, coffee, palm oil and timber does not contribute to deforestation that causes massive damage to the environment and nature. That explains why it got such a large majority in the European Parliament, where the rapporteur was Christophe Hansen, now the EU’s agriculture commissioner.
But EU lawmakers have made a number of mistakes during EUDR's passage to the statute. By failing to conduct impact assessments of the law’s effect on smallholder farmers, they left themselves open to accusations of hurting poor farmers in developing countries. The commission was then slow to offer the financial and logistical support to enable such countries to comply with the new regime.
Yet the real reason the EUDR is now to be delayed for two years – and quite possibly permanently – is not because of coffee farmers in Ethiopia but because the von der Leyen commission has fallen out of love with its own Green Deal and sees EUDR as something that can be bartered off in exchange for sweeter terms in trade deals with Brazil, India, the United States and now Indonesia.
It is hard to believe that the announcement of an EU trade deal with Indonesia, also on Tuesday, was a mere coincidence.
But gutting EUDR would be a massive blow to the EU's credibility. It is fundamentally a good and important law that should be given the resources needed to function properly.
- Benjamin Fox, Africa editor
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