:2023-02-01 Source:Source: ENVI committee Category: Industry
On 16 January 2023, ENVI committee meeting held and Members voted on provisional agreements on Deforestation. The next day, the voting results were announced, with 69 votes in favor, 4 votes against, and 5 abstentions.
The new law will require all companies to issue a due diligence statement in order to sell products like coffee, cocoa and wood on the EU market. Those linked to deforestation will be banned from import and export into the EU.
It is a text that has a real impact on our daily lives. We’re talking about very concrete items – your morning coffee or your morning chocolate,” said Pascal Canfin, the chairman of the European Parliament’s environment committee.
The great specificity of this law – and this is a world first for palm oil, cocoa, coffee, beef, and rubber – is the obligation to have a certificate based on satellite images and GPS coordinates to know exactly where the commodity comes from,” Canfin explained.
When you arrive on the EU’s internal market – at the port of Amsterdam or Le Havre – you must show this certificate. And if you don’t have it, you can’t go in”.
The amount of inspections carried out will depend on the country of production, with the most high-risk countries seeing 9% of operators and traders trading products checked.
The new EU law was hailed as “groundbreaking” by green campaigners.
We have made history with this world-first law against deforestation,” said Anke Schulmeister-Oldenhove, Senior Forest Policy Officer at WWF European Policy Office.
The EU will not only change the rules of the game for consumption within its borders, but will also create a big incentive for other countries fueling deforestation to change their policies,” she said in a statement.
Greenpeace hailed “a major breakthrough for forests,” adding that the new EU law “will make some chainsaws fall silent and stop companies profiting from deforestation.” It regretted, however, that the regulation offers only “flimsy protection for the rights of Indigenous People who pay with their blood to defend nature”.
