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Smallholder farmers could lose millions as Brussels enforces new rules to stop destruction of forests
The EU's deforestation law is facing growing pushback from African states and the wider international community over fears that the compliance burdens imposed by the new law will be prohibitively high for smallholder farmers.
The law, which was adopted in April 2023 and comes into force this year, was hailed by EU lawmakers as a landmark in the bloc's push towards sustainable business practices and slashing carbon emissions. It will require exporters of products made from commodities such as coffee, cocoa, timber and rubber to prove that they were not associated with deforestation at any point in their supply chain (Dispatches 16/5/22, Euro MPs back action on cocoa prices).
African states are at different levels of preparedness for the new rules. Officials in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, the world's main cocoa producers, say that they will be ready; but Ethiopian officials have indicated that they will ask the EU executive for more time to comply.
Kenyan officials say that most of their smallholder farmers are unaware of the new European law.
At February's Munich Security conference, Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, warned that the EU's new anti-deforestation law would prevent 'millions of people in Africa' from selling their products to the EU market.
'You can't work good for the planet and do bad for the people. If people can't live, and people can't have peace and the people can't have prosperity,' said Mottley.
Similar complaints were brought at the World Trade Organization's ministerial conference in Abu Dhabi in late February (Dispatches 28/2/24, Carbon row heads to the World Trade Organization).
Uganda, which is Africa's second largest coffee exporter after Ethiopia, says that it has secured an arrangement with the EU that will see the Uganda Coffee Development Authority present due diligence certificates for batches of coffee, rather than individual farmers. That could help reduce the compliance burden on smallholder farmers.
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