“It’s like throwing a fire extinguisher through the window of a burning building. » Environmental protection associations expressed their serious concerns on Wednesday October 2, after the European Commission proposed postponing for one year the implementation of the regulation on imported deforestation, considered one of the key texts of the green deal. “Backing down on such a law in the middle of the fire season in the Amazon is a very bad signal, deplores Boris Patentreger, the France director of the NGO Mighty Earth. The Commission gave in to the lobbies. » « Ursula von der Leyen [la présidente de la Commission] condemns forests to another year of destruction »also reacts Greenpeace.
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Adopted in 2023 and supposed to come into force on December 30, this regulation aims to prohibit the import and export of a series of products (cocoa, coffee, soy, palm oil, wood, rubber, beef, leather, etc. ) from deforestation. It is based on a traceability system: in order to market a good on the European market, companies must be able to guarantee that it is not associated with a deforested plot after December 31, 2020, thanks to the use of geolocation data and satellite photos. The European Union is responsible for around 16% of deforestation linked to global trade.
Brussels’ decision comes in a context of strong tensions, while multiple actors have been urging for months to suspend the application of the text, considered too complex and too vague. This is the case for many states, such as Indonesia, Brazil, Ivory Coast, but also the United States, Argentina and Bolivia. Brasilia, for example, recently criticized a “unilateral and punitive instrument”contrary to “principle of sovereignty”.
Support from Berlin
Within the Union itself, Austria, supported by around twenty States, requested, in March, a “targeted review” text and an extension “considerable” of the implementation period. Several economic sectors have also stepped up to the plate, including the agri-food, livestock, trade and wood industries. In France, for example, around twenty organizations in the forest-timber sector have called for the postponement of a “inapplicable regulation”.
The European People’s Party (EPP), from which Ursula von der Leyen comes, became the spokesperson for these demands and used all its weight to obtain this deadline, with the support of certain capitals, including Berlin. “Taking into account the comments received from international partners on the state of their preparations”the Commission therefore put on the table, on Wednesday, a proposal aimed at postponing the entry into force until December 30, 2025 for large companies and June 30, 2026 for small and very small companies.
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