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Brazil has urged EU officials to delay implementing deforestation laws that it calls “unilateral and punitive”, increasing pressure on the European Commission over the landmark legislation.
Exports of wood, soya and coffee are among the products affected by the new rules, which would cover about a third of Brazil’s exports to the EU.
In an effort to prevent European consumers from contributing to global deforestation, any commodities from these sectors that originate from deforested land will be banned from the bloc. The rules also cover other commodities such as palm oil, cocoa and rubber.
In a letter, Mauro Vieira and Carlos Fávaro, Brazil’s foreign affairs and agriculture ministers respectively, requested that the EU delay implementation of the law, due to come into force on December 30, and “urgently reassess its approach”.
“We consider the EU Deforestation Regulation to be a unilateral and punitive instrument that disregards national laws on combating deforestation,” the ministers wrote.
EU officials have indicated that the commission is considering a delay to the overall implementation or a simplification of the rules. The commission declined to comment on the Brazilian letter but said it would reply “in due course”.
Brazil and Colombia have asked for a debate on the measure at the World Trade Organization this month. They intend to put pressure on the EU, one official said. But neither country has yet initiated a formal complaint.
Pascal Canfin, an MEP who was former chair of the European parliament’s environment committee, called on Brazil to speed up moves to ban deforestation.
“Brazil finds the deforestation regulation problematic since it covers one-third of its exports linked to deforestation. It is up to Brazil to ban deforestation, not the EU to change its rules,” he said in a post on X.
Brazil’s complaint echoes the concerns of the EU’s other trading partners including the US, which said in a letter in June that the law presented “critical challenges” to American timber, pulp and paper producers.
Since announcing the planned law in 2021, Brussels has faced calls from trading partners to delay or revise the legislation, with particular pressure being put on its system of grading countries according to EU analysis of whether they have “high”, “standard” or “low” risk deforestation.
Diplomats from countries in Latin America and south-east Asia, which are leading exporters of commodities such as coffee and palm oil to the bloc, have pushed back against these criteria. One described the benchmarking system as a “political instrument” that allowed the commission to choose which countries had increased access to the European market.
In a speech to the European parliament in July, commission president Ursula von der Leyen said Brussels should “listen and respond better to the concerns of our partners impacted by the European legislation”, particularly in the area of climate and environmental laws.
Brussels has already delayed the start of the strict benchmarking system, instead deciding to categorise all countries initially as “standard risk”.