It was hailed by campaigners around the world as a game-changing piece of legislation that would help stop deforestation.<\/p>\n
But when a bullet-ridden version of the EU\u2019s deforestation regulation, once supposed to be the crown of the Green Deal, finally limped across the legislative line this month, not even its architect was smiling, and one politician said it had been pretty much \u201cdismantled\u201d.<\/p>\n
Hugo Schally, the law\u2019s original author who has since retired from the European Commission<\/a>, told the Guardian he believed it had been \u201chollowed out\u201d by the removal of obligations on downstream traders to verify the origin of commodities such as palm oil, soy, wood, beef, rubber, cocoa and coffee.<\/p>\n \u201cThere now will be fewer actors with direct obligations, fewer data points along the value chain and less precise origin data, which will make enforcement and eventual prosecution more difficult,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The Green party\u2019s vice-president in the European Parliament, Marie Toussaint, went further, saying that delays, loopholes and an added exemption for printed products \u2013 an apparent sop<\/a> to appease President Donald Trump<\/a> \u2013 amounted to the \u201cpolitical dismantling\u201d of the law. She called on the commission to withdraw the proposal.<\/p>\n It is a far cry from the hopes of the 1.2 million EU citizens who signed the petition<\/a> kickstarting the process to ban deforestation-linked products from Europe\u2019s market in 2020. Launching the proposal in 2021, the EU\u2019s then-Green Deal commissioner, Frans Timmermans, trumpeted<\/a> it as \u201cthe most ambitious \u2026 ever put forward\u201d to combat forest loss.<\/p>\n Four hundred and 20 million hectares of forest \u2013 an area larger than the EU itself \u2013 have disappeared since 1990, in part thanks to Europe\u2019s consumption patterns. Timmermans said that the draft law showed \u201cour willingness to walk our \u2018green talks\u2019 globally\u201d.<\/p>\n But critics say that the proposal\u2019s unravelling shows the EU\u2019s willingness to walk back the green talk. The law was twice delayed<\/a>, for 12 months each time, over IT issues, drawing condemnation<\/a> even from the environment commissioner who initially oversaw it. \u201cBy reopening this file instead of solving a simple IT problem, the commission opened Pandora\u2019s box,\u201d Toussaint said.<\/p>\n In its original form, the law required companies to monitor their third-party contractors and trace the origin of commodities destined for Europe back to their original plot of land, using geolocation data. The idea was to make companies that allowed deforestation along their supply chains liable for punishment with criminal charges and fines of up to 4% of annual turnover.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t bureaucracy for its own sake,\u201d Schally said. \u201cIt was the mechanism that made the rules enforceable, created a verifiable paper trail, and stopped companies from hiding behind complexity in the supply chain.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the due diligence involved triggered a Brussels backlash with multinationals<\/a>, producer countries<\/a>, rightwing parties<\/a> and EU logging states<\/a> all brandishing axes. Last year\u2019s EU elections were pinpointed as a \u201ca decisive moment because there is now a different majority [in parliament]\u201d by Andreas Rasche, a corporate sustainability professor and associate dean at the Copenhagen Business School. \u201cThe conservatives of the European Peoples party (EPP) are building an alliance with far-right parties<\/a> [which] hate the Green Deal and want some of these regulations gone altogether.\u201d It was this alliance that passed the legislation in the European parliament.<\/p>\n There was also intense pressure from some of the biggest exporters to the EU. Rasche said: \u201cThe other pressure on the deforestation regulation has come from big trading partners outside the EU \u2013 particularly the US \u2013 and there is a feeling that the commission gave in to some of their demands in trade talks earlier this year<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n In the final legislation downstream operators were largely freed from an obligation to submit due diligence statements, another exemption was introduced for a \u201clow risk\u201d category of small operators, and a new window was opened for further \u201csimplifications\u201d next spring.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the only countries that will be subjected to \u201chigh risk\u201d scrutiny for deforestation are four geopolitical adversaries of the EU: Russia, Belarus, North Korea and Myanmar.<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of tightening downstream obligations to close loopholes, it stripped them back,\u201d said Schally. \u201cBy shifting responsibilities upstream, creating a lighter \u2018downstream operator\u2019 category and cutting repeat attestations, it reduced the number of companies that are directly accountable in the system. By allowing less precise origin information for some operators, it weakened the very transparency the regulation relied on to detect laundering, mixing and deforestation-by-proxy.\u201d<\/p>\n