The European Commission has proposed delaying the EU’s flagship anti-deforestation law for the second year in a row as it continues its war on red tape.
The rules, which would force companies to stop using commodities that have been produced on deforested land, are unpopular with many businesses who argue they impose complex regulatory burdens. Several of the EU’s trading partners have also complained about the law.
“[W]e still cannot believe that we can really get this without disruption for our businesses,” the EU’s environment commissioner Jessika Roswall told reporters on Tuesday, announcing the delay of the European Union Deforestation Regulation. “We need the time to combat the risk with the load of information in the IT system.”
The regulation was originally scheduled to apply from Dec. 30 2024, before the Commission proposed delaying it to the end of this year, giving companies and trading partners an extra 12 months to get ready to comply with the new tracing and due diligence requirements.
But more time is needed, said Roswall, and the EU executive has now sent letters to the Council of the EU and the European Parliament proposing a further delay.
It’s the latest in a long string of actions by the Commission since late last year to weaken or delay green rules, part of a grand push to get rid of red tape and boost the global competitiveness of European industry.
The anti-deforestation rules, which target commodities such as coffee, beef, soy and palm oil, require companies to look deep into their supply chain to ensure these commodities hadn’t contributed to deforestation or human rights abuses. Some businesses claimed this information was often unobtainable.
The commissioner denied the Commission’s push to delay was linked to complaints from trade partners, such as the U.S., Japan or Malaysia. She also denied it was linked to the conclusion of thorny trade talks with Indonesia on Monday, the world’s largest exporter of palm oil.
Roswall kept the door open to tweaking the substance of the deforestation rules. “The other thing that we also have been working [on] for a long time is the simplification of different angles,” she said, which the Commission will “now also discuss with the ministers.”
A majority of EU members earlier this year called for the deforestation rules’ application to be delayed, pending cuts to certain measures.
An EPP win
The center-right European People’s Party, the biggest force in the European Parliament, has long been pushing to weaken and delay the rules.
“Our efforts have finally been successful,” said Peter Liese MEP, the EPP’s environment spokesman. “If the deforestation regulation had entered into force unchanged on 1 January, it would have caused unsolvable problems for many small foresters, farmers, and small and medium-sized enterprises, such as medium-sized coffee roasters,” he said.
Green groups condemned the Commission’s decision.
The proposed delay is an “unacceptable and a massive embarrassment for President von der Leyen and her Commission,” said Anke Schulmeister-Oldenhove, forest policy manager at the WWF European Policy Office. “If this technical issue is real, this shows not only incompetence, but also a clear lack of political will to invest sufficiently in a timely implementation of the EUDR.”
Thomas Waitz, agriculture coordinator for the Greens, said it was a “dark day for global forest protection.”
The Commission is “bowing to the wishes of the agricultural industry and sawmill lobby and their EPP henchmen,” he said.
A study published last month found that deforestation has killed more than half a million people in the tropics over the past two decades because of heat-related illness. Another found that about 75 percent of the decrease in rainfall in the Amazon rainforest is directly linked to deforestation.
Louise Guillot contributed to this report.
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