The European Parliament will vote on the postponement of EUDR implementation by 2 years and a paradigm shift is proposed. What does it all mean for the project of the new Forestry Code?
On November 13 and 14, the European Parliament will cast a decisive vote on postponing the implementation of the EUDR (Deforestation-Free Products Regulation) and will propose amendments to the form sent by the European Commission. The vote comes on the proposal of the European Commission, which thus recognizes that the implementation of the regulation was insufficiently prepared. And the European Council has already approved this postponement.
The European Parliament’s vote comes with no surprises – the European People’s Party, which holds the majority, supports the postponement of the EUDR and, more importantly, proposes a series of major amendments, a real paradigm shift: maintaining the objectives while eliminating excessive regulation.
According to an editorial signed by Benoit Nieuwenhuys, Fordaq CEO, the EPP calls for several changes to significantly simplify the regulation’s bureaucracy, lessen the negative impact on the competitiveness of Europe’s wood-based industries and keep the Commission’s EUDR objectives tangible:
– Preventing the products that Europeans buy, use and consume from contributing to deforestation and forest degradation in the EU and worldwide.
– Reducing carbon emissions from EU consumption and production of relevant commodities by at least 32 million metric tonnes per year.
– Combating deforestation and forest degradation caused by the expansion of agriculture to produce the basic products that fall within the scope of the regulation.
What amendments does the European People’s Party propose?
- Creation of a new category – countries of origin that present no risk. The “no risk” category will include those countries that will meet the following criteria:
- Forested areas remained stable or increased compared to 1990.
- They signed the Paris Agreement on climate change, international conventions on human rights and preventing deforestation.
- They have regulations to prevent deforestation and conserve forests that are strictly implemented, transparent, and monitored.
Operators from these countries will have lighter obligations compared to those from other risk categories. Important: Romania ticks all three criteria, so the competitiveness of wood-based industries in our country would not be affected.
- Removal of legal obligations for EU companies that market products manufactured or imported by a third party (referred to as the “operator”). This provision respects the principle of the obligations of the operators when first placed on the market, not downstream throughout the value chain.
- Postponing the EUDR implementation by two years and obliging the European Commission to prepare all the necessary instruments at least six months in advance. As Nieuwenhuys notes, it may seem like a common-sense requirement, but it is currently less than 2 months away from the originally forecast entry into force – and these tools have not yet been made available to operators who would need to comply with the regulation .
- Ensuring that the EUDR avoids trade wars, in an international context that is expected to be turbulent in the coming period. For example, the current form of the EUDR requires geolocation data for the origin of the wood materials used in the products. But important players in the wood market cannot comply with this requirement, due to some particularities of the context in which they operate. For example, in the USA the ownership of the forest background is extremely fragmented, so the geolocation of each batch of raw material from a single finished product would be extremely difficult to put into practice. And in China, the state prohibits its companies from providing geolocation data.
The EUDR is intended to be a powerful tool in the context of climate change, where human activities have a considerable impact. But large-scale deforestation is happening in the Global South – Africa, South America or Asia-Pacific – where demography and agriculture dictate in recent decades highly invasive interventions in the forest floor.
European Union states, on the other hand, have a proven track record in protecting forests and in the sustainable use of wood.
Applied to the letter in its original, practically unnecessarily complicated form, the EUDR would have meant very high costs for economic operators in the sector, would have reduced the competitiveness of European companies and would have affected efforts to adopt wood on a large scale, as a renewable resource and a material that stores CO2 in the long term. It would practically nullify the purposes for which the Regulation was created.
What does all this mean for Romania?
In certain circles, our country has a distorted image related to the scale of the phenomenon of illegal logging and the lack of will of the Romanian state in combating the phenomenon of illegal logging.
In fact, analyzing all the progress made especially in the last 10 years, Romania could successfully tick the criteria for a risk-free country of origin in the EUDR sense:
- The forested area has increased steadily after 1990, as evidenced by the National Forest Inventory, INS data, and satellite data from the European Forest Observatory, which monitors deforestation and forest degradation globally.
- Romania is a signatory to the Paris Agreement and all relevant conventions for the protection of the environment and human rights.
- National regulations are among the strictest, and the SUMAL system is certainly one of the most complex wood traceability monitoring tools in the world.
During this period, the draft of the new Forestry Code is on the last hundred meters in the debates of the parliamentary committees, to be submitted to the vote in the plenary of the Chamber of Deputies.
The public, media pressure of the NGOs is to pass a variant that jeopardizes Romania’s performance on all these criteria, the Forest Code not bringing applicable solutions to the major problems related to the sustainable management of forests:
- reducing administrative costs caused by over-regulation and bureaucracy;
- financing the sustainable management of forests and primarily the accessibility of forests;
- a compensatory system for the loss of agricultural income through the forestry use of land to avoid the deforestation of the vegetation outside the forest fund in order to collect agricultural subsidies.
The discussion is artificially focused on adjacent, secondary topics such as:
- the guarantee by the Forestry Code of free access to forests (which has never been restricted);
- the establishment of the Green Belt of Bucharest (the forests around the big cities are already, at present, assigned a special protection role and protected by the forestry legislation in force);
- confiscation of trucks used in crimes (doubling the existing provisions in the Code of Criminal Procedure).
These debates fueled by viralized emotions mask substantial points, for which a consistent, rational discussion based on arguments and facts has not taken place since the first version of the draft Forestry Code was published.
SUMAL must become a system consonant with the European logic of the EUDR
Strictly to the subject, the development of the SUMAL system was removed from the trajectory drawn by the European principles of the EUDR and the previous EUTR European Regulation in force in the period 2013-2023, regarding the trade in wood materials, respectively traceability and obligations imposed on operators when first placed on the market of wood and wood products.
Thus, SUMAL must return to the European principles of ensuring the traceability of wood, to certify the legal provenance when first placed on the market, the fact that the wood comes from the legally authorized limits of the exploitation park – not to hold managements in sawmills and track the wood even the furniture! Currently, on a regular processing chain, in Romania the legal obligation is reached to measure the wood successively 7-10 times, redundant and useless for combating illegal cutting.
The European regulation can be a source of sound principles for the development of the forest sector – wood-based industries in Romania and must guide the project of the new Forestry Code to produce a functional, strong legislative framework oriented towards sustainable management of forests and sustainable development of the economy and communities.
The SUMAL case is just an example. The Romanian Association of the Wood Industry – Prolemn supports the integration of all these principles in the Forestry Code and participates in all debates organized by the Romanian Government and Parliament.