The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is under attack once again. Not content to have delayed the regulation by a year last November, shortly ahead of its entry into force, the European People’s Party (EPP) and far-right parties are now using a flaw in the legislation to discredit it in its entirety.
Later today, the European Parliament will vote on an objection to the classification of countries’ deforestation risk under the EUDR. While the classification is certainly flawed, this must not be allowed to create further delays to this crucial piece of legislation.
Nearly four years on from COP26, where 140 countries pledged to end deforestation by 2030, the destruction of global forests continues. Almost 16 million acres of forest was lost in 2023. The reduction of deforestation in the Amazon has been offset by losses elsewhere, such as Bolivia, Indonesia, and Brazil’s Cerrado region.
Deforestation is almost 50% higher than a pathway to eliminate deforestation by 2030 would require, according to the latest Forest Declaration Assessment, a study backed by many environmental NGOs.
The EUDR remains our first and only tool for effectively tackling the impact of EU consumption on the world’s forests. The regulation will help monitor supply chains of the most impactful products to ensure that they are not coming from deforested territories. It will also help guide international progress on tackling deforestation and make global trade more sustainable.
Despite wide support from communities affected by deforestation, the EUDR has been met with reticence from some trading partners. The delay may be designed to make way for the EU’s trade deal with Mercosur — an agreement that might put the EUDR at risk by pitting environmental protection against trade objectives.
Political delays for EU deforestation
Today’s vote centres on a country benchmarking mechanism recently adopted by the European Commission, which is supposed to classify countries based on the risk of deforestation occurring there. In reality, it is highly flawed and seems to contravene the basic act of the Deforestation Regulation.
The regulation requires the classification of both low-risk and high-risk countries based on three criteria: the rate of deforestation and degradation; the rate of agricultural expansion; and production trends. The assessment may also consider other secondary criteria such as whether a country is subject to international sanctions.
The Commission did take into account the positions of the Parliament and the EU Council when developing the list of low-risk countries, which considered the three compulsory criteria. But where a country is classified as high-risk this appears to depend purely on whether or not they are the target of EU or UN commercial sanctions. As a result, the only countries included in the high-risk category for deforestation are Belarus, North Korea, Myanmar and Russia.
The EUDR text obliges the Commission to cooperate with all countries that are classified as high-risk to jointly address the root causes of deforestation and forest degradation. Obviously, when it comes to countries under sanctions, such cooperation is impossible.
The benchmarking is supposed to be a strictly technical measure, not a political one. The Commission’s failure to properly classify major deforestation hotspots as high-risk directly contradicts both the spirit and the letter of the EUDR.
Indigenous peoples from around the world have raised the alarm about this list, drawing on their own experience of displacement, land-grabbing and environmental pollution to conclude that their countries and regions ought to be included in the high-risk category.
Poor legislation & legal challenges for EUDR
This kind of poor administration will leave the EUDR open to legal challenges. Already within the European Parliament, opponents of the EUDR are using the flaws in the benchmarking list as justification for an objection against it. Once again, it is the EPP and the far-right that have seized on this chink in the EUDR’s armour to discredit the regulation and question its future.
MEPs need to stand firm in support of the EUDR and its vision for more just and sustainable trade, and then the Commission must get real about its implementation, including on-the-ground measures such as assistance to smallholders in transition to sustainable production methods.
Later this year, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) will publish new deforestation data which will include regional deforestation impacts. To show that it is serious about making the EUDR work, the Commission must not wait five years to update its benchmarking. It should reissue the benchmarking in 2026, integrating the latest FAO data and using the methodology required by the Regulation to designate high-risk countries.
To do so is technically possible; it just requires the political will to protect the EUDR and, more importantly, the world’s forests.
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