Why Brussels can’t see the deforestation for the trees
Many officials in Brussels must wish they’d never heard of deforestation, or at least the EU’s ideas about how to stop it. The deforestation regulation, which started as a well-meaning attempt to prevent palm oil, cocoa, coffee and other commodities being grown on recently cleared land, has metastasised into a fractious diplomatic confrontation with more than a dozen countries. Most are poorer than the EU and many are former colonies, giving the whole thing an unpleasant post-imperialist edge.
Amid complaints from Brazil and Australia about inaccurate data, seven of the EU’s 27 member states are now calling for the regulation’s implementation to be delayed beyond the original date of December 30 this year.
The EU prides itself on a progressive commitment to development. But its deforestation rules and carbon border tax are placing burdens on developing countries. Its promises to improve aid, investment and trade access are not compensating.
The problem with the regulation is not the principle but the compliance, which has clearly not been created with the capacity of poorer countries in mind. The system was designed by the EU environment directorate, which has relatively little experience dealing with international trading partners.
To check that palm oil is not being grown on deforested land, for example, satellite photos of tree cover have to be cross-checked on the ground by individual inspection visits to farms. Given that there are, for example, around 2.6mn smallholder palm oil growers in Indonesia, this is incredibly laborious work.
Irritation within the EU, let alone among producing countries, has now broken into the open. Sabine Weyand, director-general of the trade directorate, told a seminar in April: “I think we have to recognise that we have pushed away a number of partners we need through our increased use of autonomous trade measures . . . we hear that increasingly on measures like the deforestation regulation.”
Weyand’s suggestion was to widen out the EU’s offer to the developing world — including the “Global Gateway”, its strategy for increasing investment, particularly for the climate transition and especially in Africa. On the receiving end, though, these broad-spectrum ambitions often don’t seem to amount to much.
Odrek Rwabwogo, senior adviser to the president of Uganda on trade, says that imposing climate compliance costs on Uganda makes little sense. The country is one of the lowest carbon emitters per head in Africa. Fewer than half of Ugandans have electricity connections. And Rwabwogo says his country doesn’t need lectures about the importance of forests: “We green our bare hills because it’s in our interest, not because the EU tells us to.” But, he says, smallholder coffee farmers in wooded areas with little environmental impact are being treated as though they were large commercial concerns.
A better solution for Uganda would be to fulfil its long-held wish to go up the value chain and roast coffee in-country rather than using more land simply to expand the production of low-value green coffee beans. Rwabwogo says: “Keeping us in green bean supply causes deforestation.” But he says the big roasting companies don’t want to invest and transfer intellectual property to Uganda, and the EU can’t help. “Our conversations with Europe are not on the level we would like. We want them to be about growth but they are just about compliance.”
It remains to be seen how much private investment the Global Gateway manages to attract, but in the meantime the reductions in actual development aid are a bad sign. The European Council on Foreign Relations says that in the first two months of 2024, the EU cut €4.8bn in development assistance, 6 per cent of total aid from the EU centrally, Germany and France.
Development assistance to Africa has, in effect, been diverted to dealing with refugees from Ukraine. (Spending on refugees in the donor’s own country, absurdly, counts as aid under the OECD definition.) The EU has also shovelled billions to Egypt and Libya for euphemistically entitled “migration management” to slow the flow of refugees across the Mediterranean — despite those countries’ gross violations of human rights.
You can see why the pious invocations of commitment from Brussels to the developing world ring a bit hollow. Disjointed policymaking, poor implementation, political exigencies diverting money and attention away from the low-income countries they were supposed to serve: all these have made the EU’s attempts to reduce deforestation unnecessarily cumbersome and unpopular. A delay seems wise, but the EU should use the time not just to iron out the obvious compliance wrinkles but to give some thought to how climate, trade and development policies might be combined into a more coherent strategy.
At the moment, those countries on the receiving end of EU environment and aid policies can be forgiven for finding Brussels capricious and uncomprehending. That is not exactly what it set out to do.
