The European Parliament (EP) and the Member States of the European Union (EU) agreed to ban the importation of products that contribute to deforestation such as cocoa, coffee and soybeans, a decision that could affect Brazil.
Palm oil, timber, beef and rubber, as well as various associated materials (leather, chocolate, furniture, printed paper, coal), are also at stake, the EP said in a statement.
Import will be prohibited if these products come from regions deforested after December 2020, taking into account the damage inflicted not only on primary forests, but on the entire forest.
Importing companies will be responsible for the supply chain and must demonstrate their traceability through crop geolocation data, which can be associated with satellite images.
The EU is responsible for 16% of global deforestation through imports and is the second largest destroyer of tropical forests behind China, according to the non-governmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
The text was proposed in November 2021 by the European Commission, and the Member States took up the discussion of the main lines of the document, but the deputies voted in September to strengthen it significantly, expanding the range of products in question – in particular to rubber, absent in the initial proposal.
The EP had also requested that the scope of the text be extended to other threatened forest ecosystems, such as the Cerrado savannah (Brazil/Paraguay/Bolivia), where some of the EU’s soybean imports come from.
The agreement reached between the negotiators of the European Parliament and the Member States, after long negotiations, finally stipulates that this extension “to other wooded lands” must be evaluated at the latest one year after the entry into force of the text.
Likewise, after two years, the European Commission is forced to study a possible extension of the scope of application to other products (such as corn, which the MEPs wanted to target from now on), to other ecosystems rich in storage of carbon and biodiversity, but also to the financial sector, another demand of the MEPs.
Source: TSF
