The European Commission’s proposal to postpone the application of the regulation on imported deforestation is not deemed sufficient (see EUROPE 13495/1). While welcoming it, seventeen developing countries have expressed their concerns about the content of the regulation itself, in a letter sent to EU leaders on Tuesday 29 October.
According to Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, Ghana and the other signatories, the European Commission has failed to address “many of their concerns” in its recently published supplementary documents, such as the policy paper and the strategic framework for engaging international cooperation on combating deforestation.
Whereas Austria and other EU Member States have stated in recent months that the absence of classification would lead to disproportionate controls for low-risk countries and an increase in due diligence for all market players, the seventeen developing countries that signed the letter are of the opinion, on the contrary, that the performance evaluation system is discriminatory, because it “imposes different rules on different countries”. Following the proposal to postpone the regulation, the EU has given itself until June 2025 to draw up a list of countries classified as “high, standard or low” risk. Controls will be higher for the former category.
However, the signatories are also concerned about the “one-size-fits-all” approach of the regulation, which does not take into account the existence of monitoring systems and databases that are specific to each country (see EUROPE 13492/1) or, in their view, “the specificities and common practices of each supply chain”.
Read the letter: https://aeur.eu/f/e38 (Original version in French by Florent Servia)