The European Parliament’s rapporteur, Christine Schneider (EPP, German), is set to abandon the creation of a ‘no risk’ country category in the regulation on combating imported deforestation, ahead of a new round of trilogue negotiations between the European Parliament and the EU Council on Tuesday 3 December.
The German MEP would in fact like the fourth category of the benchmarking system to appear at least “either in a revision clause or in a recital, but no longer in an article of the legislative text”, a source close to the matter told Agence Europe on Monday 2 December, confirming information revealed by Euractiv. But these options remain “a priori unacceptable to the EU Council and to the progressives in Parliament”, added our source.
With a revision clause, Christine Schneider would make it possible to amend the text at a later date. But the Commission and the EU Council already rejected the idea of postponing discussion on the creation of a category of ‘no risk’ countries until 2028, during the first trilogue meeting on Thursday 21 November (see EUROPE 13530/1).
Contacted by Agence Europe, Ms Schneider confirmed that the EPP group’s objective remained to “implement the key elements of our amendments – if necessary, in a different form”, despite the EU Council’s “total lack of willingness to compromise”.
According to the rapporteur, “countries practising sustainable forest management should be exempted from unnecessary documentation requirements”. Added to the high-risk, standard-risk and low-risk categories, which classify countries according to their level of deforestation, the ‘no risk’ category would, in her view, have enabled such a distinction to be made.
Ms Schneider’s request that the regulation only enter into force six months after the publication of the risk classification and only if the online platform provided for in the regulation is fully operational is not expected to pose a problem, since the European Commission has already committed itself to these points.
Christine Schneider also stated that she did not want to jeopardise “the postponement of the entry into force of the regulation”. This will require an agreement by 30 December 2024, the initial date of application of the legislation. (Original version in French by Florent Servia)