Flawed numbers underpin recommendations to exclude commodities from EU deforestation legislation

Other - Focali Policy brief, 2021

A leaked draft impact assessment, informing the EU Commission’s coming legislative proposal for minimizing the risk of deforestation and forest degradation associated with products placed on the EU market, has led to recent debate. A key point of contention is the scope of the proposed regulation: the impact assessment recommends that some key forest-risk commodities – maize and rubber – be left out of the regulation. In this policy brief we show that the analysis that underpins this conclusion has severe flaws and that current evidence does not support such a recommendation.

Key message to policy makers:
Current evidence does not support recommendations to exempt key forest risk-commodities, such as
maize or natural rubber, from EU legislation on imported deforestation.