The European Union passed on Tuesday a law banning any good from a recently deforested farmland. Here’s what it looks like.
The European Union just took a historic step towards the protection of forests worldwide. The Commission agreed on a ban on a series of goods that have been grown on deforested land, including beef, coffee and soy.
The law aims at reducing and discouraging deforestation worldwide, which alone causes 10% of global emissions every year. Most of this deforestation is due to an expansion of farmland to grow crops and cattle. South American countries are the most hit by this phenomenon, including Brazil and Colombia.
The Amazon is the biggest rainforest in the world, but every year millions of acres are lost to farmland. A process difficult to reverse and extremely harmful for the planet. South-East Asia as well is affected by deforestation, especially Indonesia, home to the third biggest rainforest on the planet.
In the last century, Europe’s forests have grown in size, consequently reducing farmland. While this was great for the planet, Europe just kept consuming the same amounts of products, meaning they had to be imported from somewhere else.
So, while forests in Europe grew, other places saw a steep increase in deforestation. Between 1990 and 2020, Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest was deforested for an area equal to the entire European Union. And some policies of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro exacerbated this process.
Now, it seems, the EU wants to do something about it.
What does the EU law on deforestation look like
If enforced, the new EU law will ban any imports of goods produced on deforested land. The official limit to consider deforestation is 2020, so anything coming from farmland created before will not be taxed.
According to the EU’s official site, the products included in the ban are: palm oil, beef, timber, coffee, cocoa, rubber and soy; as well as other derived products like chocolate. Any company that does not comply will receive a fine of up to 4% of its turnover.
Unfortunately, this law only refers to proper rainforests, glossing over savannahs and any biome in between. As some critics have pointed out, Brazil has 600.000 km2 of savanna ready to be made farmland. An area as big as Ukraine.
Changes in the law will be made in the months and years to follow. Now, EU member states have to approve the law, after which companies will have 18 to 24 months to comply. Plenty of time to approve changes.
So, the deforestation law will not have any real effects for at least one year. That is also the reason why 2020 was designed as the limit year, to discourage countries from carrying out more deforestation before the law goes into practice.
