Pamela Coke-Hamilton, executive director of the ITC, a joint agency of the UN and the World Trade Organization, told the Financial Times that the ban on products linked to deforestation entering the EU favored large companies that can trace where their products were grown. and ran the risk of “cutting off” smaller suppliers. “What the larger producers can do is, not being able to trace these small farmers, simply cut them off,” he said. Countries such as Brazil or Honduras, among the bloc's main coffee suppliers, or Indonesia and Malaysia, key exporters of palm oil and rubber, are among those most affected by the regulation. Coke-Hamilton warned that exporters in those countries could try to circumvent regulation by shipping products to countries with less strict import rules, disrupting trade flows.
Depending on how well the EU addresses its outreach to developing countries, the law's impact on global trade could be “catastrophic or it could be fine,” he added. The legislation, which will come into force at the end Job Function Email Database of next year, is the first in the world to ban imports of products linked to deforestation, including livestock, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soy, timber and rubber. It is part of an ambitious environmental agenda set by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in 2019 that gives the bloc a goal of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Ministers from Indonesia and Malaysia, concerned about their palm oil industry, are among those who have urged the EU to relax the new rules. If small producers cannot meet the requirements to export goods covered by the law, they risk "a vicious cycle," Coke-Hamilton said.
Once you lose market share, you lose income, then there will be a lot of increased poverty and then more deforestation because the root of deforestation is poverty. "We falling into the trap of reinforcing something we are trying to change," he added. The ITC provides technical support in trade matters to smaller countries. The law will compare countries according to whether they have a low, “standard” or high risk of deforestation or degraded forests. Customs officials will check more goods coming from high-risk areas. The 27 EU member states will be responsible for carrying out checks and rejecting goods coming from areas where forests have been logged or damaged since 2020. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated that 420 million hectares of forest, an area larger than the EU, were lost worldwide between 1990 and Each year, the world continues to lose 10 million additional hectares of forested land, according to the commission.