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This Wednesday, April 19, the Parliament of the European Union approved a law against imports that come from crops that are complicit in deforestation. Under the new regulations, companies will have to demonstrate their good practices through labels on their origin and detailed information. The legislation will affect basic products such as soybeans or palm oil, among others, and will sanction offenders with fines of up to 4% of their business volume.
It is a historic decision against bad practices in forests and deforestation. This Wednesday, April 19, the European Parliament approved a law which will ban imports of coffee, beef, soybeans, palm oil and other basic products into the European Union if they are related to or obtained through deforestation.
To verify this, the companies that exploit and export these products and want to market them in one of the 27 countries of the European Union (EU) must do so with various tests of good practices.
The first, a label that shows that the products have not been cultivated or taken from land exposed to deforestation since December 31, 2020, at risk of high fines. They must also comply with the regulations of the nation in which they are produced and provide “precise geographic information” on the cultivation land where said products grew, tracking that allows verification of compliance with all regulations.
“The damage from deforestation goes beyond the loss of trees: it affects entire ecosystems, disrupts the water cycle, contributes to climate change and threatens the way of life of millions of people,” said Environment Commissioner Virginius Sinkevicius. after the validation of the European Parliament by 552 votes in favor, 44 against and 43 abstentions.
For its part, the European Union must ensure that all companies with which it trades and do not comply with the regulations receive “competitive” and “dissuasive” sanctions. To do this, they will be able to use different tools, from DNA tests on products to satellite surveillance of crops.
Towards the end of 2024, the EU will draw up a list of countries according to their risk: low, medium or high. The body will have to review at least 9% of products from countries with the highest risk.
MEP Pascal Canfin, from the liberal block of Renew Europe, assured that it is “the first law in the world that puts an end to imported deforestation.”
“All the opinion polls show that Europeans do not want to contribute to deforestation, but they had no chance of knowing, when they have a cup of coffee in the morning or a cup of chocolate, if they are complicit in imported deforestation,” Canfin said. .
The responsibility of developed countries in the face of deforestation
According to UN data, 10 million hectares of forests are destroyed annually in the world, which is equivalent to a territory larger than Portugal. And, what is more alarming for EU countries, it is estimated that consumption within the EU is responsible for 10% of deforestation, according to data from the Council of the EU.
Deforestation, in turn, is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions and contributes to the global climate crisis.
“European consumers will no longer be unwitting accomplices in deforestation,” said Christophe Hansen, a negotiator for the law in the European Parliament.
Based on this, the regulation aims to eliminate deforestation from the supply chains of everyday items in Europe that are obtained from tropical forests or biomes exposed to this type of practice.
According to MapBiomascattle raising and agriculture -in its different forms- are responsible for about 90% of deforestation in the Amazon, the largest tropical forest in the world since 1985.
Therefore, it is no secret that this new regulation will have a direct effect on all the countries that make up the Amazon in South America, a forest that is suffering the worst levels of deforestation in the last decade. The law will especially affect nations like Brazil or Peru, which are home to most of the Amazon.
And it is that, in addition to the products, the EU also wants companies to guarantee that they respect the human rights of workers and indigenous people who inhabit the different regions.
In this regard, environmental organizations such as Greenpeace have assured that this is just “the first step.” They have also criticized the fact that other places such as the African savannah, El Cerrado in Brazil or El Chaco in Argentina have not been included.
Although the law is not directed at any specific territory, several countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia have positioned themselves against the regulations, ensuring that they cannot comply with requirements such as geolocation.
Some experts fear that, in the same way, this regulation will negatively affect the development of the trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur, which was signed in 2019 after twenty years of negotiation, but which has not yet been put into practice.
The measure aims to be a step forward for the preservation of the planet, Greenpeace assures that if superpowers like China or the US applied similar regulations, they would end 75% of global deforestation. And it is that the fines of up to 4% of their turnover to which companies are exposed represent a fairly dissuasive measure.
With EFE, AFP and Reuters
