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Coffee-producing nations could find their exports blocked from the EU market unless Brussels delays a ban on products from deforested areas, one of the world’s biggest coffee and tea companies has said.
JDE Peets said that if the bloc’s new deforestation law was not postponed by at least a year it could temporarily cut countries from its supply chain amid uncertainty about their compliance with the rules.
“There’s a need for clarity to be provided from the EU and time is ticking,” said Christopher Beath, JDE Peet’s global coffee and tea sourcing director. The sector had made significant investments based on its own understanding of the new rules, he said, warning that companies would find it hard to comply with the deadline “if that interpretation is incorrect”.
The EU deforestation regulation (EUDR), which targets commodities such as cocoa, palm oil and rubber as well as coffee, is set to come into force on December 30. But the European Commission has yet to publish compliance guidelines — drawing fire from national governments including Germany, from industry bodies and from the head of the World Trade Organization.
An online compliance system is expected to be unveiled soon, according to EU officials involved in the preparations.
Amid the criticism, Brussels in coming days is set to postpone the introduction of a traffic light system that would determine the different level of checks goods from different countries face, the officials said. The law has sparked anger from exporting countries, with Brazil terming it “unilateral and punitive”.
Lawmakers from the centre-right political group in the European parliament of commission president Ursula von der Leyen also weighed in on the debate on Thursday.
“The bureaucratic monster threatens the supply of animal feed and the trade of many consumer goods,” said MEPs Herbert Dorfmann of Italy and Peter Liese of Germany. “The commission must take enough time to fix the many problems with the legislation.”
The European Cocoa Association earlier this week also asked the commission to extend by six months the transition period before the rules come into full force “to avoid an implementation failure”.
“The absence of clarity on key elements . . . makes preparing for the new rules highly uncertain from a legal perspective,” said the industry body that represents European cocoa processors and chocolate makers.
The coffee industry is particularly concerned that a mapping system provided by the non-profit Enveritas will not be compliant with the EU rules.
Enveritas uses high-resolution satellite imagery to identify deforested coffee-growing areas, then works with governments and farmers to replant the land, allowing the whole country or region to be declared deforestation-free. As well as JDE Peets, it counts coffee-producing countries, including Ethiopia and Uganda, among its clients.
But the EU legislation requires that each shipment of coffee be traced back to the specific “polygons” — or plots of land — where it was grown.
The volumes in each cargo must correspond to the volumes that can reasonably be produced from the specific polygons attached to that shipment in order to avoid batches of coffee from deforested land being mixed in with compliant beans.
This rules out the broader approach of providing mapping of whole countries or regions.
The Enveritas approach successfully addressed deforestation, said Beath, but “adherence to the EUDR is something else”.
He said that JDE Peets was prepared for all scenarios but if Enveritas’s mapping was deemed non-compliant by Brussels, some producers using it might not be able to sell to the EU after December 30.
Enveritas has amended its model accordingly, breaking down the data from country-level to show co-operatives or communities. But environmental groups still say that it could allow loopholes in compliance.
Julia Christian from the NGO Fern, which monitors the EU’s involvement in forests, warned that the approach could fail if no determination was made whether “that coffee has actually come from the polygons”.
“Companies have known this regulation was coming for several years now,” Christian said, adding that some businesses “have chosen to take the risk of not preparing properly”.
“It’s unacceptable for them to use this to pressure politicians to change the law after it has already been passed, when other companies have made the investments to be compliant in time.”