“There is no obvious political justification for these changes”, complained ClientEarth on Tuesday 21 October, referring to the amendments to the anti-deforestation regulation proposed by the European Commission on the same day (see EUROPE 13735/4).
The European Commission wants to postpone the entry into force of the regulation for small and micro-enterprises until 30 December 2026, and grant a six-month grace period for checks and gradual compliance for medium-sized and large enterprises. As planned, they will have to comply with the regulation from 30 December 2025.
Operators acting downstream in value chains will be able to use the due diligence statements of the operator who is acting upstream, rather than submitting their own.
These measures seem more a way of appeasing European forest owners than of solving the IT problems put forward by the Commission (see EUROPE 13715/5), according to the NGO, which notes that forest owners are subject to similar requirements under the EU Timber Regulation and that stakeholders have had more than two and a half years to prepare for the ‘imported deforestation’ regulation.
According to Greenpeace Europe, by exempting European manufacturers and the EU’s forestry and agricultural sectors from their reporting obligations, the European Commission has “given in to lobbying and political pressure”.
In the same vein, the WWF believes that the EU must stop “sabotaging its own laws and start keeping its promises”. The NGO is calling on the European Parliament (see EUROPE 13736/18) and the Council of the EU to maintain the regulation as adopted. Several EU Member States have already indicated that they would be looking for greater simplification. (Original version in French by Florent Servia)