“This is an important moment. We are the first in the world to adopt the principle of such legislation”, said Wednesday November 17 on franceinfo Pascal Canfin, MEP of the Renew group and president of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, while the European Commission wants to ban imports of certain products in the European Union, when they contribute to deforestation. The draft text of the European Commission targets “the heart of the most impactful raw materials for tropical forests”, specifies Pascal Canfin.
franceinfo: Do you support the European Commission’s proposal and is it applicable?
Pascal Canfin: We not only support it, but we put a lot of pressure on the European Commission to put this text on the table. Today is an important moment, because we are the first in the world to adopt the principle of such legislation. On the practical side, it can work in a very simple way. Companies like Danone, Nestlé or Mars, which everyone knows, already practice the fight against imported deforestation in their purchases, in their value chain. It was by talking to them that we learned how they actually did it using GPS coordinates and satellite images. If you are Danone and you buy palm oil in Indonesia, you ask for the GPS coordinates of the palm oil that was provided to you to find out on which hectare it was produced. You are using Copernicus satellite images. And you see if, in 2021, it is a palm oil plantation, and if in 2018 it was a tropical forest in Indonesia. And if the pictures speak for themselves, you are no longer buying palm oil. And if you buy it, you have very significant penalties.
On millions of products, is this method possible?
There are not millions of products. What we are targeting are agricultural raw materials that are the most responsible for deforestation in the world. The economic intermediaries who buy coffee, chocolate, wood and palm oil are very concentrated markets. For example, Cargill, the world’s largest commodities trader, is American. But if this American company wants to sell on the European market tomorrow, it will have to ensure the traceability of the coffee or chocolate it purchases, and guarantee to the European buyer, Carrefour or Danone for example, that this coffee or this chocolate comes from ‘a hectare that has not been recently deforested. Satellite photos today are accurate to the nearest km2.
If these products are targeted, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soy, beef, wood. Wouldn’t it take more?
The European Parliament, and myself first, are ready to include rubber trees, which are used to make rubber, which is one of the main causes of deforestation in South-East Asia, on this list. We could possibly extend the list a little bit, and I think we will do so in the European Parliament. But the core of the most impactful raw materials for tropical forests are already concerned.
The principle is therefore to go to the root of the problem and not to leave it to the consumer to make the difference himself?
You are a European consumer. You have a cup of coffee in the morning. No matter how strongly you are convinced of the need to fight climate change, and therefore to protect tropical forests, you have no way, as we speak, of guaranteeing that the coffee you buy and that you drink, did not come directly from the Amazon rainforest which was razed and replaced by a coffee plantation. So what we are going to do is to provide this guarantee to the European consumer. You will tell me, ‘if we only do this on the few percent of European consumers who are willing to possibly buy this zero deforestation coffee at a higher price, in the end we will not have a massive impact on deforestation’. However, we no longer have time. We know we are in a climate emergency.