The rights of indigenous peoples and the reform of EU trade agreements such as the one with Mercosur are at the heart of the draft report by Michèle Rivasi (Greens/EFA, France) on the EU’s contribution to the fight against biodiversity loss in developing countries.
Presented on 25 February to the European Parliament’s Committee on Development, it was very well received.
This own-initiative report is a response to the loss of biodiversity in the context of achieving the UN 2030 agenda, in accordance with the agreement of competences, negotiated hard with the Committee on the Environment, which is leading the position that the EU will defend in the international negotiations at the COP15 in Kunming next May.
“70% of the world’s poor live in rural areas and depend directly on biodiversity for their survival and well-being. In addition, resource extraction and land grabbing exacerbate the loss of biodiversity due to agribusiness, which hinders the achievement of the SDGs”, Ms Rivasi stressed.
A holistic vision. She believes that a compartmentalised vision of biodiversity protection, limited to the mere expansion of protected areas, would be a mistake: “we need a holistic vision, conservation models will not be able to compensate for the impacts of our agricultural and trade policies on biodiversity”. Her report therefore suggests a wide range of actions in various EU policies.
She proposes that the EU “stop exporting agricultural and trade models that destroy the environment and health”, the systematic inclusion of biodiversity and climate, a global moratorium on the release of GMOs into the wild, including for field trials.
She suggests that the EU should introduce a duty of care law to make companies and their financiers directly responsible for ensuring that their imports are not tainted by land grabbing and deforestation.
Her report also argues for a true One Health approach, as the majority of medicines used for healthcare are rooted in biodiversity.
She calls for wildlife trafficking to be classified as a serious crime and for the EU to make the fight against environmental crime a strategic political priority at COP26 on climate and COP15 on biodiversity.
Ms Rivasi “encourages the EU and its Member States to support this paradigm shift to include ecocide and the rights of future generations in international law”.
Rights of indigenous peoples. Her report calls for States to recognise and protect the rights of indigenous peoples. Decision-making on all aspects of protected areas must be made with the participation and consent of indigenous peoples. They should be entitled to restitution or other forms of redress when their land has been included in protected areas without their consent.
MEPs welcomed the draft report, agreeing with Norbert Neuser (S&D, Germany) that it “is in good hands”. This MEP insisted in particular on the need for standards for European investors.
The ECR group warned of the risks to agricultural productivity posed by overly stringent pesticide and fertiliser reduction requirements.
Dominique Bilde (ID, France) felt that the EU should “stop carrying sustainable development alone at the global level”. She also mentioned China’s investments in its Silk Road project, involving energy from coal and infrastructure projects that are highly damaging to biodiversity in developing countries, China’s role in deforestation, particularly in Africa, and “the overexploitation of fish resources by the Turkish and Chinese fleets in West Africa, which worsened during the Covid-19 crisis”.
The aim is for the report to be submitted to the European Parliament “ideally in April”, according to Ms Rivasi and committee chair Tomas Tobé (EPP, Sweden). (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)