Anyone with doubts about who has the whip hand in relations between America and Europe need look no further than new rules aimed at cutting global deforestation by 10%.
‘Don’t make The Donald mad’ appears to be the order of the day, especially with ongoing trade talks and a NATO summit around the corner.
Last week it emerged that the US forestry industry will avoid close scrutiny under new regulations due to come in at the end of the year.
The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) requires companies to prove that products such as soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa, coffee and rubber are not linked to any deforestation since 2020.
The bureaucracy needed to demonstrate this will be costly and burdensome for business, hence the pushback from the Americans.
To try and fend off a Trump backlash the EU have classified the US as ‘low risk’, requiring minimal checks.
But this still isn’t enough for a powerful forestry coalition across 18 states who want to reject EUDR rules completely and make the US “fully exempt”.
It remains to be seen whether US suppliers agree to settle for the minimal inconvenience that a ‘low risk’ classification brings, or push for full exemption.
A letter sent by the largest nine forestry organisations last week did not augur well.
It showed them in no mood to roll over, accusing Brussels of rules which ‘disproportionately benefit EU supply chains.”
Heidi Brock, head of the American Forest and Paper Association, said EUDR amounted to a ‘non-trade tariff barrier’ for US paper and wood products.
Which is a bit rich from a country which has sent out a tsunami of tariffs across the world, but you can see how Trump has emboldened US business to be more like Trump.
Equally controversial is Brazil’s rather generous classification as a ‘standard risk’ under EUDR given how much that country has been decimating the Amazon rainforest for decades to feed the beef industry.
At the moment only countries which face EU and UN sanctions are to be classified as ‘high risk’ under the new rules. Why not Brazil too?
About a third of global deforestation occurs in Brazil’s Amazon forest,
amounting to 1.5m hectares every year.
Between 2001 and 2023 nearly 70m hectares was lost with 43 % of global deforestation in 2022 occurring in Brazil.
Only last month new legislation was passed granting a free pass to hundreds of cattle farmers who had illegally converted large swathes of rainforest into pasture land.
The expectation that illegally used land will eventually be sanctioned by the authorities has been one of the main drivers of deforestation, such is Brazil’s lax enforcement of its laws which farmers take advantage of.
In one state, Rondonia, fines and pending legal settlements amount to $280m – a fraction of the $1bn in damages owed.
So with a track record like that how can Brazil not be deemed ‘high risk’, even with the pledges made by the new Lula government?
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
Take the cocoa, coffee and palm oil industries which over the years have also been accused of being significant drivers of deforestation.
Many coffee companies now have the building blocks in place to comply with EUDR with 55% of the world’s coffee production covered by a standard that enhances traceability.
Cocoa can be produced without deforestation through satellite and monitoring systems, which the National Wildlife Federation is working on in a worldwide initiative launched at the 2018 COP.
And in 2019 SD Guthrie, the biggest producer of palm oil in Malaysia, launched an open online access tool which checks whether its products are sourced from deforestation.
Should countries producing these commodities which are demonstrating traceability be classified the same as Brazil with its history of rampant destruction of the rainforest to satisfy the demands of the meat industry?
The answer is no. The environmentalist, Sir David Attenborough, singled out the destruction of the Amazon rainforest in his 99th birthday message.
He said:
“The planet cannot support billions of large meat-eaters. There just isn’t the space. If we all had a largely plant-based diet we would need only half the land we use at the moment.
“We must radically reduce the area we use to farm so we can make space for returning wilderness, and the quickest way to do that is to change our diet.”
Now that’s food for thought.
Dear reader,
Opinions expressed in the op-ed section are solely those of the individual author and do not represent the official stance of our newspaper. We believe in providing a platform for a wide range of voices and perspectives, even those that may challenge or differ from our own. We remain committed to providing our readers with high-quality, fair, and balanced journalism. Thank you for your continued support.
