At a meeting of the Committee of Permanent Representatives of the Member States to the EU (Coreper) on Wednesday 29 October, there was very broad support for the fact that the Regulation on Deforestation-free Products, aimed at tackling imported deforestation, in its current form, cannot come into force as planned on 30 December 2025.
Many Member States have asked for a further postponement and, potentially, a simplification that goes beyond the Commission’s proposal - a European source said on Wednesday (see EUROPE 13740/2).
Several delegations would have suggested a ‘stop-the-clock’ measure to give themselves more time to assess the effects of the text. Other Member States are said to have insisted that they could only support the Commission’s proposal, without going any further in terms of simplification (see EUROPE 13735/4).
The Danish Presidency of the Council of the EU has reportedly concluded that a majority of Member States do not want the regulation, in its current version, to come into force at the end of December.
However, positions remained divided as to how to proceed. The Danish Presidency indicated that it would reflect on the way forward, while stressing the exceptionally short timeframe and the need to find a position that could also serve as a basis for an agreement with the European Parliament. Austria is expected to raise the issue once again at the extraordinary ‘Environment’ Council meeting on Tuesday, 4 November.
Twenty-six organisations are calling for a reassessment. In a statement issued on Wednesday 29 October (https://aeur.eu/f/j6l ), 26 European organisations (CEI-Bois, Confederation of European Forest Owners, Copa-Cogeca, etc.) called on the European Commission to introduce a “stop-the-clock” mechanism to enable a reassessment of the impact and implementation of the EU Deforestation Regulation.
According to these organisations, this reassessment should identify genuine simplification measures and make the text’s obligations more proportionate, while fully preserving its legitimate environmental objective: to effectively combat deforestation.
The signatories criticise the Commission’s simplification proposal and believe that it should have announced a postponement of the regulation’s entry into force.
The proposed changes are substantial, according to the organisations, and merit the necessary time for stakeholders and political decision-makers to analyse and debate them, given the current deadline of 30 December 2025 for their entry into force.
“It is unrealistic and unacceptable to expect that companies will be ready to comply right away with a regulation that has been hastily renegotiated”, the organisations stress. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)