Mighty Earth environmental group expresses major concerns over EUDR risk categories

Environmental campaign group Mighty Earth has moved to express notable concerns over the EU’s rating systems for EUDR, split across Low and high risk for origin products including cocoa and palm oil, which remain key ingredients within the sector’s value chain, reports Neill Barston. 

According to the non-profit organisation, the EU is “leaving the back door wide open to goods that have been produced on recently deforested or degraded land” or grown illegally in protected areas such as wildlife refuges, national forests and Indigenous territories.

In what it describes as an extraordinary move, key countries with very highest levels of deforestation and degradation – such as Brazil, Bolivia and DR Congo – have all been left off the “High Risk” register.

The EUDR frameworks, which have been broadly accepted by the cocoa sector as well as many other industries, have been beset with delays, after having originally come into force at the start of this year, they will not now be fully operational until the start of 2026. They are aligned to corporate due diligence legislation within Europe that has also faced pushback from industrial lobbying, with businesses being concerned that compliance costs would hurt profit margins.

Mighty Earth Policy Director Julian Oram said: “The EUDR has become more about controlling political narrative than about controlling deforestation. Almost since it came into force in June 2023, the European Commission has been doing its utmost to bend the law to the will of those who don’t like it – namely companies and governments that preside over, and benefit from, the destruction of the world’s precious remaining forests. Today’s revelation of which countries have been classified under the EUDR risk benchmarking system is the latest, and perhaps most bizarre, example of this capitulation.”

“The risk benchmarking was supposed to reflect the likelihood that products such as beef, soy, palm oil, coffee, cocoa and timber entering the EU originated in areas that have been recently deforested or were produced illegally. Instead, the risk list published today shows that it was based on political horse trading and favouritism. For countries such as Canada, Ghana, Papua New Guinea and Romania to be classified as “Low risk” is nonsensical, and seemingly wilfully belies recent evidence of deforestation, forest degradation, and illegality linked to commodities originating from those countries being sold on the EU market.”

“The responsibility for this farcical classification does not primarily lie at the doors of the European Commission. Instead, it rests on EU member state governments, some of which have turned their backs to the climate and Nature emergency facing the planet at the behest of corporate lobbyists from the forestry and agribusiness sectors, especially in countries such as Austria, Germany and Finland. This is their legacy, and it will haunt them.”