The European Commission proposes to postpone the entry into force of its law against deforestation until the end of 2025

This postponement will still have to be ratified by the Member States and the European Parliament. The anti-deforestation law is a major obstacle to the proposed EU-Mercosur free trade agreement, defended by German industry and Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

This possible decline makes environmental NGOs jump. Under pressure from the United States, Brazil, but also Germany, the European Commission proposed, on Wednesday October 2, to postpone by one year, to the end of 2025, the entry into force of its law against deforestation . This new regulation was to prohibit, from the end of 2024, the marketing in the EU of a series of products from lands deforested after December 2020, including cocoa, coffee, soy, palm oil , wood, beef, rubber, leather, furniture and even paper.

The law must also force importing companies, responsible for their supply chain, to prove the traceability of products via geolocation data provided by farmers, combined with satellite photos.

This postponement of the text, promulgated in 2023, will still have to be ratified by the member states and the European Parliament. The Brussels proposal comes after “global partners have repeatedly expressed their concerns” on the implementation of this law, assures the Commission. Another element of context: the ongoing negotiations for a free trade agreement between the EU and the South American countries of Mercosur. The anti-deforestation law is a major obstacle to this project defended by German industry and by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who pleaded Wednesday to conclude “quickly” these commercial negotiations.

Postponing this law is “like throwing a fire extinguisher out the window” while the “building is on fire. It’s an act of vandalism against nature”, castigated the NGO Mighty Earth. It’s a blow “chainsaw” of the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, denounced Greenpeace. “Europeans don’t want products from deforestation on supermarket shelves,” argued this organization.

At the origin of 16% of global deforestation through its imports, the EU is the second destroyer of tropical forests behind China, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

At COP 26 in Glasgow in 2022, the leaders of around a hundred countries representing the vast majority of the world’s forests committed to stopping the disappearance of these forests by 2030. Unfortunately, the continuation of the conversion of certain forested areas into agricultural areas for livestock or cultivation, particularly soya, continues to wreak havoc. However, in addition to the importance they play in preserving biodiversity, forests are essential for regulating the climate, thanks to trees which naturally store CO2, the main greenhouse gas, the quantity of which in the atmosphere has exploded since the beginning of the 20th century due to human activities. Deforestation means increasing carbon emissions, which reinforce the greenhouse effect. These emissions linked to deforestation increased by 6% in 2022.