Trade officials ‘taking a chainsaw’ to EU forest protection plans.

 Extract from The Guardian

European Commission

Exclusive: leaked memo shows trade department raising concerns about environment colleagues’ draft law.

Deforestation on Indonesia's Sumatra island.

Jennifer Rankin in Brussels

Fri 12 Nov 2021 23.26 AEDT

Last modified on Sat 13 Nov 2021 01.23 AEDT

European trade officials have been accused of “taking a chainsaw” to a draft EU law to protect the world’s forests, as a leaked document revealed an attempt to water down the plans.

The European Commission is due to unveil a proposal on Wednesday to prevent EU sales of beef, soya, cocoa and other products linked to deforestation. A leaked memo seen by the Guardian reveals that commission trade officials have raised “serious concerns” about the regulation drafted by their environment department colleagues.

Last week the European commissioner for trade, Valdis Dombrovskis, told delegates at Cop26 that trade policy “must do more to help us achieve our global climate targets”, referencing the upcoming anti-deforestation law. The EU joined the US, China and other major forested countries including Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in a voluntary declaration in Glasgow to halt and reverse the felling of forests.

To help make this promise a reality, the EU is proposing to prevent beef, palm oil and other commodities driving deforestation from being sold in its market. In a departure from past EU laws, the commission proposed to regulate products linked to all deforestation, legal or illegal, according to an earlier leaked draft. Previous laws have sought to clamp down on illegal deforestation only.

Trade officials have attempted to throw out that provision, arguing that it would be “a direct challenge to notions of sovereignty over land use decisions, whether in the EU or in third countries”. The memo says targeting all deforestation “will be particularly difficult to accept” in forested countries, including Brazil whose president, Jair Bolsonaro, disputes the notion that forests are a global public good. Refocusing the law on illegal deforestation would bring the EU into line with the US and UK, who are considering narrower laws, the officials add.

The trade officials also say the costs of complying with the EU law would hurt subsistence-level farmers, and warn of retaliation by foreign governments through the World Trade Organization.

In another move to limit the regulation, they argue that the law should be limited to deforestation rather than forest degradation, citing the absence of international definitions on the latter which they say would make the law hard to enforce.

“Combined with the absence of international standards, [including forest degradation] poses serious policy and legal concerns and we consider it a risky avenue to try to justify this on the basis of public morals,” the memo states.

That move will disappoint environmental campaigners, who this week wrote to the commission urging broad protection of all threatened ecosystems. “Not only is forest degradation a precursor for deforestation, it also fuels climate change and biodiversity loss, as degraded ecosystems lose their capacity to provide essential services to nature and people, such as carbon storage,” said the letter by a coalition of more than 55 non-governmental organisations.

Environmentalists point to the work being done by the EU’s scientific arm, the Joint Research Centre, to define international standards of forest degradation, arguing that it would be possible to come up with a working definition of forest degradation.

Sini Eräjää, of Greenpeace, one of the signatory organisations, called on the commission to ensure that all deforestation, legal or not, was covered by the law. “We are very aware of the fact that ecosystems that enjoy legal protection today could lose that tomorrow when there is a turn in local politics in the regions where the forests are … Whether legal or not, obviously, biodiversity and climate don’t care,” she said.

“While trade commissioner Dombrovskis promises climate action and forest protection at Cop26 in Glasgow, his team in Brussels is taking a chainsaw to the new EU rules supposed to tackle deforestation.”