The United Kingdom government led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing pressure from retailers to adopt a British version of the European Union's Deforestation Regulation. This comes despite serious concerns that the European legislation could shut small farmers and producers out of the market.
The Retail Soy Group (RSG), which includes the supermarket giants Tesco and Sainsbury's, has urged the United Kingdom's new environment minister Steve Reed (Steve Reed) to finalise a new law on deforestation-risk commodities, at a time when the minister has yet to complete his first 100 days in office. The absence of equivalent deforestation legislation in the United Kingdom is “fuelling further uncertainty in the market and hampering retailers' efforts to meet shared commitments to end deforestation and land-use change. Continued inaction risks the United Kingdom becoming a dumping ground for deforestation-linked commodities”. The debate has highlighted some of the regulatory dilemmas the United Kingdom faces after Brexit.
Rishi Sunak's Conservative government, defeated in the July election by K. Starmer's Labour Party, had planned to copy the EU's carbon border levy, while the Online Safety Act it passed was modelled on the EU's Digital Services Act.
R. Sunak's administration had drawn up a “Forest risk” commodities law with provisions similar to those in the EU regulation, banning companies from using illegally produced goods from deforested areas and requiring a due diligence system to be set up for each commodity. However, the bill was not introduced before the United Kingdom general election, and it has not been included in K. Starmer's government's first legislative programme.
At the same time, pressure continues on the European Union either to delay or to revise the Deforestation Regulation. In mid-August Fairtrade International called on the European Commission to take account of the emerging situation in which the forthcoming law on combating deforestation will harm small producers. Fairtrade International said it was “deeply concerned” that some producers “will be excluded from the opportunity to take part in the European market or pushed out of supply chains, not because they are farming on deforested land, but because they will find it difficult to identify, collate, manage and submit the required data”.
The organisation called on the EC to “address the shortcomings in the regulation and help the millions of smallholder farmers at risk”.
The European Union regulation on deforestation-free products covers cocoa, coffee, palm oil, cattle, rubber, soy and timber, as well as a range of products such as leather, chocolate, charcoal and printed paper that are made using those raw materials.
The adoption of the law was the culmination of years of campaigning by politicians and activists for Europe to move towards more responsible business practices. The law (the Deforestation Regulation) will come into force in January 2025. Initially it will apply only to large companies, requiring them to check their international suppliers and publish annual due diligence reports to guarantee that no deforestation has taken place.
Officials in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana (where more than 55% of the world's cocoa beans are grown) say they will be ready for the law to be applied. However, there are well-founded concerns that producers in the coffee sector are far less prepared to comply with the regulation.
In April this year the EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius reported on a number of European Union-funded programmes to help Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana meet the new due diligence standards.
Ethiopia, a major coffee producer, is one of many developing countries seeking to agree with the European executive on an extension to the application of the Deforestation Regulation. That would allow more time to achieve compliance.
In Europe, the governments of 20 countries wrote to the European Commission even before the European Parliament elections in June, asking for the Deforestation Regulation to be amended, concerned that European farmers too should have more time to comply with the regulation's requirements.
Traders, meanwhile, have warned that the regulation is already pushing prices up, as buyers stockpile easily stored commodities such as coffee and cocoa beans in order to avoid potential problems later on.
The article's author, Benjamin Fox, is an experienced reporter and editor who previously worked at the Brussels-based publication Euractiv. B. Fox's reporting has also appeared in the Guardian, the East African, Euractiv, Private Eye and Africa Confidential, among others. Benjamin Fox heads the EUobserver's European Union desk, based in Nairobi, Kenya.