European trade officials are accused of “holding a chainsaw” in the EU’s draft law protecting the world’s forests because a leaked document shows that someone is trying to downplay these plans.
The European Commission will announce a proposal On Wednesday, prevent the EU from selling beef, soybeans, cocoa and other products related to deforestation. A leaked memo seen by The Guardian showed that the Commission’s trade officials raised “serious concerns” about the regulations drafted by their colleagues in the environment department.
Last week, EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis (Valdis Dombrovskis) Police 26 The trade policy “must do more to help us achieve our global climate goals”, referring to the upcoming anti-deforestation law.The EU voluntarily joins other major forest countries such as the United States, China, Brazil, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo Glasgow Declaration Stop and reverse deforestation.
To help fulfill this promise, the EU proposes to prevent beef, palm oil and other commodities that cause deforestation from being sold on its market. Unlike past EU laws, the commission proposes to regulate all products related to legal or illegal deforestation. Draft leaked earlierThe previous law was only an attempt to combat illegal deforestation.
Trade officials tried to cancel the clause, believing that it would “directly challenge the concept of sovereignty over land use decisions, whether in the EU or in a third country.” Jair Bolsonaro said that targeting all deforestation “will be particularly difficult to accept”. Controversial concept Forests are a global public product. The official added that the renewed focus on illegal deforestation laws will bring the European Union into line with the United States and the United Kingdom, which are considering reducing the scope of their laws.
Trade officials also stated that the cost of complying with EU laws would hurt farmers who subsist on their livelihoods and warned that foreign governments would retaliate through the World Trade Organization.
In another move to restrict regulations, they believe that the law should be limited to deforestation rather than forest degradation, citing the lack of an international definition of the latter, which they say will make the law difficult to enforce.
“Plus the lack of international standards, [including forest degradation] This has caused serious policy and legal problems, and we think this is a risky way to try to prove this on the basis of public morals,” the memo pointed out.
This move will disappoint environmentalists, who wrote to the committee this week urging extensive protection of all threatened ecosystems. “Forest degradation is not only a precursor to deforestation, but it also exacerbates climate change and biodiversity loss, because degraded ecosystems lose the ability to provide basic services to nature and humans, such as carbon storage,” letter A coalition of more than 55 non-governmental organizations.
Environmentalists pointed out that the work being carried out by the European Union’s scientific institution Joint Research Center is to define international standards for forest degradation, and that it is possible to propose a working definition of forest degradation.
Sini Eräjää of Greenpeace, one of the signatories, called on the committee to ensure that all deforestation, whether legal or not, is within the scope of the law. “We are very aware of the fact that when the local politics of the forest area changes, the ecosystem that enjoys legal protection today may lose it tomorrow… Whether it is legal or not, obviously, biodiversity and climate do not care,” she says.
“Although Trade Commissioner Dombrovskis pledged to take climate action and forest protection at the 26th Conference of the Parties in Glasgow, his team in Brussels is using chainsaws to deal with new EU rules aimed at addressing the problem of deforestation.”
