The European Union has been a world leader on climate change, passing groundbreaking legislation to reduce noxious greenhouse gases. Now the world is pushing back.
Government officials and business groups around the globe have jacked up their lobbying in recent months to persuade EU officials to suspend a landmark environmental law aimed at protecting the planet’s endangered forests by tracing supply chains.
The rules, scheduled to take effect at the end of the year, would affect billions of dollars in traded goods. They have been denounced as “discriminatory and punitive” by countries in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa.
In the United States, the Biden administration petitioned for a delay, as US paper companies warned that the law could result in shortages of diapers and sanitary pads in Europe. In July, China said it would not comply because “security concerns” prevent the country from sharing the necessary data.
Last week, the chorus got larger. Cabinet members in Brazil, the director-general of the World Trade Organization and even Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany — leader of the largest economy in the 27-member European Union — asked the European Commission’s president to postpone the impending deforestation regulations.
The uproar underscores the bruising difficulties of making progress on a problem that most everyone agrees is urgent: protecting the world’s population from devastating climate change.
The widespread, often illegal, destruction of tropical forests and woodlands contributes to the buildup of carbon emissions and rising temperatures, increases soil erosion and flooding, and destroys habitats for thousands of animals, putting them at risk of extinction.
After years of debate, lawmakers approved a ban in 2023 on all products derived from seven key commodities — cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soybeans and wood — cultivated on newly cleared forest land. The result are rules that affect pretty much every item used in your home, slathered on your body or put in your mouth, from living room sofas and lipstick to soap and instant noodles. Penalties for traders are steep.
The hope was that the law would have a cascading effect, spurring nations like the United States, China, India and Japan to pass similar legislation.
Yet proving that each step of a supply chain is free of ingredients linked to deforestation is formidable in a globalized world of mass production.
“Both the private sector and governments are rapidly innovating solutions,” said Tina Schneider, director of forest governance at the World Resources Institute, “but the challenges remain complex and varied across both commodities and geographies.” Some countries already have monitoring systems in place. Argentina and Uruguay have been tracing cattle for more than 15 years. Ghana, one of the world’s largest exporters of cocoa, has mapped 1.2 million farms so far and has said it can start tracking cocoa beans from farms to ships next month.
Several multinational food giants, including Nestlé, Mars Wrigley, Mondelez and Unilever, have backed the deforestation rules, while ADM announced that its verifiable supply chain for soybean oil and meal was ready.
And the United Nations Development Program, which has conducted workshops on compliance, noted that several countries, including Peru and Vietnam, were establishing certification systems.
Progress, though, is uneven. And officials, farmers and trade associations around the globe have complained that the law, which requires companies to map every square foot of farmland and trace the origin of every soybean or wood chip, is nearly impossible to comply with.
Even within the European Union, agricultural ministers in 20 countries, including Austria, France, Italy and Sweden, have reportedly asked for a delay.
For some countries, the response to the law is akin to passing through the seven stages of grief. Some are still in denial; many are in the anger and bargaining phases; a few have progressed to acceptance and hope.
At the same time, the law has become a flashpoint for other concerns and grievances.
Developing nations complain that former colonial powers are dictating rules that affect their economies. Small farmers worry they could be squeezed out of business by the cost of compliance. Poor and middle-income governments argue the law is another example of how they are bearing the costs of climate damage primarily caused by richer, technologically advanced nations. Politicians in Europe and the United States are responding to voters disgruntled about rising costs and regulations.
Protests by farmers across Europe this year have pushed European leaders to weaken other regulations and scale down climate goals.
The difficulties are real, supporters of the current timetable say, but not insurmountable. More important, they argue, the costs of delay are worse.
The consequences of inaction are “already being felt within the EU through worsening droughts and forest fires,” a coalition of 170 environmental and human rights organizations wrote in a letter to Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, opposing any postponement. Around the world, the letter said, “the destruction of forests and ecosystems continues unabated.” And groups of small farmers support the law, even though they could be dropped by large mills and refiners worried about being fined. Scores of civil society and farmer groups in the Ivory Coast, Indonesia and Brazil, for instance, have argued that the regulations would help make the supply chain more transparent and equitable.
“The new regulation enforcement does not create new, unachievable technical requirements” but builds on existing tracing tools and systems, a group of Brazilian organizations wrote in a letter to the European Union asking that the deadlines be enforced.
As the group pointed out, the regulations went through a process of public comment in 2020 before approval that resulted in 1.2 million responses.
A summary of the results found that a majority of stakeholders, which included business associations and nongovernmental organizations, “showed strong support for legally binding options,” like deforestation-free requirements, mandatory due diligence and public certification. — The New York Times
Patricia Cohen
The author is the global economics correspondent for The New York Times based in London.
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