Civil groups slam EC plan to delay EUDR implementation

Hundreds of organisations have asked the European Parliament to block a proposal by the European Commission to delay by a year the implementation date for the EU's Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).

EU member state ambassadors rubber-stamped the plan at a meeting last week, but the European Parliament will have to vote on the proposal before it can come into effect.

The EUDR applies to companies placing forest-derived commodities or products on the EU market, or exporting them from it, and will introduce a requirement for them to show that they do not drive deforestation, forest degradation, or illegal harvesting and trade.

It covers materials used by a wide range of industrial sectors, namely wood and wood products, cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber and soy.  

To come into compliance, companies will have to meet a series of obligations, including recording geolocation data of the area of production and ensuring traceability of products to the plot of land – with no exceptions – and with due diligence statements submitted to a centralised EU information system.

News of the proposal to delay the enforcement of the EUDR to December 30, 2025, has been met with consternation from groups representing the natural world – including the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Greenpeace and Global Witness - but welcomed by trade organisations who have said it will give more time to make sure their systems are ready to comply with the legislation.

"This is not the moment to give companies even more time to destroy our remaining forests," said Anke Schulmeister-Oldenhove, manager of forests at the WWF European Policy Office.

"The delay would penalise those companies that made significant investments to comply with the law on time, and reward the laggards," she added. "Is this really the signal EU policy-makers want to send?"

The EUDR was adopted in December 2022, after nearly 1.2m people in Europe told the Commission directly that they didn’t want to continue to be complicit with global deforestation and called for immediate action, and came into force in June last year, according to the Togther4Forests campaign group.

On the commercial side, the Cocoa Coalition – which includes food companies as well as organisations like FairTrade International – said: "We note the Commission’s proposal to delay implementation by twelve months, and call for this to be adopted as speedily as possible, without amendment, in order to give companies as much certainty as possible on the revised timetable."

The alliance also said it "strongly opposes reopening the substance of the EUDR for new negotiations, and urge policymakers to resist any such suggestion. This would serve only to impede the smooth passage of the proposal, increase uncertainty and jeopardise the significant investments our member companies have made in preparing for its application."

Some national governments, including Brazil and Malaysia, have claimed that it is a protectionist policy that will end up excluding poor farmers from the EU market, while there are concerns it could also drive up prices for EU consumers and prevent EU farmers from exporting products grown on deforested land.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash