Five of the world’s biggest agribusiness firms sought to weaken a draft EU law banning food imports linked to deforestation, eight days after pledging to accelerate their forest protection efforts at Cop26.
Hopes to protect the forests had been raised when the CEOs of 10 food companies with a combined revenue of nearly $500bn (£373bn) vowed to “accelerate sector-wide action” towards eliminating commodity-driven deforestation as the climate summit began on 2 November.
Agriculture is responsible for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the companies promised a supply chain reform plan to peg global heating to 1.5C by November 2022.
But by 10th November, trade associations representing five of the firms – ADM, Bunge, Cargill, LDC and Viterra – warned the EU’s green deal chief, Frans Timmermans, of soaring prices and food shortages if the EU proceeded with its own blueprint. The European Commission’s plan, which is now being considered by EU ministers, would force firms to segregate commodities such as coffee, soy, beef or cocoa thought to be linked to deforestation, and prevent them from entering the EU market. However, this is “technically and effectively not feasible”, according to the industry letter. The EU proposal could cause “major price increases and problems of availability”, the letter says, while “reducing the offer for affordable food, increasing costs for farmers and EU-based industries, and amplifying risks of supply shortages for high-protein material”.
Sini Eräjää, Greenpeace EU’s food and nature campaigner, said that the demands would have rendered the deforestation law “meaningless”.
“For example, mass balance systems allow the mixing of goods that meet legal sustainability criteria with those that do not,” she said. “They would drive a coach and horses through the middle of the EU’s due diligence proposal through which vast quantities of unsustainable and illegal goods could follow.”
The Green MEP Anna Cavazzini explained: “It is very disappointing that some of the same companies who made pledges at Cop26 to act against deforestation are asking the European Commission to water down the legislative ambitions in this area. Real change can only happen if companies practice in private what they preach in public.”
Bakary Traoré, the director of Idef, an NGO in Côte d’Ivoire, added that the industry lobbying had been more about “safeguarding the major companies’ stranglehold on the sector, than improving the lives of smallholders”.
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