Every day, the correspondents’ club describes how the same current event is illustrated in two countries.
The European Union has just adopted a law to prohibit the import of products resulting from deforestation. A text to guarantee that no product consumed in Europe will have contributed to the destruction of forests, in Asia, Africa or America. EU imports account for 16% of global trade-related deforestation, making it the world’s second largest rainforest destroyer behind China and ahead of the United States.
Small Indonesian palm oil producers call for EU efforts
Among the products targeted by this new European Union legislation are soya, beef, rubber, cocoa, coffee, wood or their derived products such as leather or palm oil. Malaysia and Indonesia are the world’s leading producers of palm oil. If local governments denounce a “discriminatory” policy on the part of the EU, on the spot NGOs welcome its decision but want to be cautious.
Caution first on the traceability of products based on palm oil, which is very complex to set up, according to several Indonesian NGOs. Controls are supposed to be based on geolocation coordinates, or on satellite monitoring tools to trace the origin of products.
>> European Union: a historic law to fight against deforestation
A simple system in theory only for the Indonesian environmental NGO Walhy, in charge of deforestation issues. The use of geolocation must seek the plantations of companies, communities and small independent producers, but to apply it is another story. In Indonesia, unfortunately, data on companies’ oil palm plantation permits are not accessible public data, and among small local producers it is only progressing very slowly. The risk is therefore that the assessments do not accurately reflect the reality on the ground, where deforestation is difficult to trace and sometimes hidden behind indirect buyers of palm oil.
According to several environmental NGOs, small farmers do not have the means to comply with all the traceability requirements of the new European law. The reasons are many: often informal transactions at the farm level and the regular absence of documents such as plantation certificates. To comply with the new EU text, Indonesia’s main smallholder oil palm syndicate is calling on the EU to provide support to smallholder farmers.
In the eyes of the NGO Walhy, small groups of independent palm oil producers are able to comply with the standard developed in the European Union, provided that Europeans provide full support to these small independent producers in terms of financial capacities and prices too, on a fairer market.
The objective, explains the NGO, would for example be to set a higher price for palm oil certified legal and without deforestation.
>>> Deforestation: a historic law of the European Union to fight against the phenomenon in Amazonia
Meat, one of the main factors of deforestation in Brazil
Every year, the Amazon is on fire, and felled trees are burned to make way for grass before the cattle arrive in stride. Beef is profitable not only through sales but also because it is a good way to occupy land while waiting for it to be valued.
Of the 4.1 million head of cattle sold per year to EU slaughterhouses, at least 500,000 would come from deforested land outside the legal framework.
Results of a study published in 2020
Brazilian groups, such as JBS, the world number 1 in meat, claim to practice a zero tolerance policy towards their supplier. Except that JBS has been accused on numerous occasions of “laundering” cattle, which consists of raising animals on an illegally deforested farm, then transferring them to another so-called “clean” one. In Brazil, the individual monitoring of oxen throughout their life is not mandatory, facilitating this type of fraud.
In Brazil, the European law will have consequences, starting with a drop in Brazilian meat imports, but it is not certain that this will be significant. Conversely, trade with Brazil should rather be revised upwards if the agreement between the EU and Mercosur is ratified later this year. It must be said that this new law only concerns land deforested after December 2020. Finally, many Brazilian producers are not involved in deforestation and are ready to produce better.
However, precisely this new law could have the effect of creating a dual market. One exporting more ethical and more expensive meat, the other being much less careful about production conditions. The EU is an important market worth more than 800 million dollars, but this remains much lower than that of China, which is by far the leading importer of Brazilian beef. In 2022, it bought more than eight billion dollars.