The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is due to apply from 30 December 2024. Austria's forestry sector has criticised the increase in bureaucracy (bureaucratic requirements) built into the regulation.
Conservation of forests was already one of the guiding principles of Austria's first forestry act, drawn up 171 years ago. Then, as now, the decisive principle was unchanged: under the law, wherever there has been forest in the past, there must be forest in the future too. Austria's modern legal system already provides for effective and robust enforcement of forest protection laws. Both forest area and timber stock in Austria are steadily increasing, and, moreover, any conversion of forest is subject to a strict official approval procedure — a point also stressed by the President of the Upper Austrian Chamber of Agriculture, Franz Waldenberger: "In our country, clearing forest (deforestation) in order to increase the area available for agriculture is effectively impossible." Waldenberger is, of course, in no doubt that the most important aim of the EU Deforestation Regulation is to protect tropical rainforests from destruction.
Agriculture and forestry play a key role in the European Green Deal strategy for protecting the climate and biodiversity. Of the 136 Green Deal legal acts at various stages of implementation, a large share concerns land management. The EUDR provisions, however, take too little account of practical processes.
"With the Deforestation Regulation, Europe has created a body of rules that imposes the same requirements on small forest owners in Austria as on large producers overseas. Specifically, every forest owner in Austria who wishes to offer timber on the market is obliged to document digitally, with a geolocated reference, in a comprehensive information system, that their produce is not linked to deforestation, i.e. the clearing of forests," Waldenberger points out. In addition to timber and all timber products, the EUDR also covers trade in livestock and soya products.
Additional requirements for forest owners in Austria
The European Commission plans to create a comprehensive information system to verify and trace the origin of products. Every forest owner who sells timber must register in this system and submit a so-called "due diligence statement". This involves entering a whole series of data into the system, such as the Latin name of the tree species, the volume and the geographical coordinates of the felling site. The information system generates a reference number, which in turn must be passed on to the next participant in the supply chain, for example the sawmill. All of this has to be done purely to satisfy a bureaucratic requirement. There is no illegal logging in Austria, which is why these requirements are essentially pointless.
The chairman of the Upper Austrian Forest Association, Franz Kepplinger (Franz Kepplinger), is convinced that many of the roughly 31,000 owners of small forest holdings in Upper Austria will not be able to clear this bureaucratic hurdle. Given the structure of small forest holdings, annual timber harvesting may no longer take place at the usual scale, because the requirements are too demanding and there are no financial incentives. "Disproportionate bureaucracy is effectively denying owners of small forest holdings access to the market," Kepplinger stresses. In the light of climate change, bureaucracy will hold back the urgently needed restructuring of forestry. Referring to the farmers' protests in Germany, Kepplinger said: "I don't believe our landowners will take to the streets with their tractors. They will quietly stop doing it, and that will be the end of it."
The timber industry rejects the European Union's requirements
Rudolf Ortner, managing director of Ortner-Holz GmbH and a representative of the timber industry at the Upper Austrian Chamber of Commerce, commenting on the new forestry law, says: "I can of course only support the European Union's approach, which aims to halt deforestation processes worldwide. We all want to work as successfully as we can to preserve the climate and nature, but the way this process is being implemented is disastrous. Instead of protecting forests, we are creating a bureaucratic monster." Two additional full-time posts would be needed for the administrative work at Ortner-Holz GmbH alone. Even more worrying for Rudolf Ortner is the fact that the industry has still not found a solution for how to put everything in place administratively and in IT terms by the end of the year. "To give you an idea: in future, the packaging of wood pellets will have room for nothing but information about where the timber used to make the product came from…"
According to Rudolf Ortner, the European Union wants to "play world policeman", but: "We cannot do that. There is a chance that rainforests will not be logged, but it is comparatively small. What we will manage, it seems, is something else: to use bureaucracy to slow down the domestic economy to the point where we will hardly be able to generate any added value afterwards."
To combat global warming, Ortner called for houses to be built from timber in future, since wood is the most effective way of capturing CO₂ from the atmosphere: "We could build every building in Austria out of wood and our forests would not suffer for it. More than 70% of the timber we process in Austria is exported."
The forestry sector wants the deadline extended
While the Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) was being drafted, the Austrian Chamber of Agriculture submitted numerous amendments in favour of a practical approach in the legislation but, unfortunately, these were not taken into account in the final wording of the regulation. Under the EUDR, every Austrian holding will soon have to prove that its timber, livestock and soya come from "deforestation-free" land. The Chamber of Agriculture is calling for countries classed as "low risk" to continue to be subject only to a documentation obligation, as laid down in the EUTR (the EU Timber Regulation), which has been in force since 2013.
In any event, Austria's forestry and timber industry is calling for the regulation's entry into application to be postponed, because without immediate clarification of the key substantive questions raised by this legislation, and without a technically fully developed European Union information system, the regulation's requirements cannot be implemented by the end of this year. That will not be possible even despite the serious and intensive efforts of the companies concerned.