How the European Union passed a brave new law to protect our planet's forests, only to realise that it is a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare that nobody wants

Even the Greens are now opposed to the EU Regulation on Deforestation, which passed with broad support in 2023.

The offices of the plague chronicle are experiencing a mild hiccough, in that their sole proprietor finds himself trying to get a roof fixed and buy a kitchen deep in the forests of the Vogtland. Tomorrow everything returns to normal, but for the moment all I have to offer you is a brief fable – the Fable of the EU Regulation on Deforestation Free Products. It seems that all of climatism is devolving into a series of fables these days, and you just know from the boring name of this particular regulation, that this fable will be a good one.

For decades and decades, Western environmentalists have been banging on about deforestation in the developing world. It turns out that people eager to produce their way out of poverty have a tendency to cut down trees – whether to sell the wood itself, to open up land for farming or for other purposes. Trees are some of my favourite things, and nobody would dispute that widespread deforestation is regrettable. But what nobody would also dispute, is that poor people are not just cutting down trees for fun, and that the alternatives to deforestation are not thwarting evil forest-hating tree-destroyers so that we can have happy forests and happy indigenous people forever; but rather certain peoples being denied an opportunity to better their position so that Westerners can feel better about the welfare of plant life on the other side of the globe. We in the West approach our forests rather more pragmatically, particularly when they get in the way of shiny new carbon-free industrial projects.

Anyway, the general angst of Westerners for other people’s forests has inspired them to instate various laws to Protect Our Planet’s Trees. One such law is the European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR), which passed in 2010. You’ll note that this was just twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the unbounded liberal vision was really unfolding. The EUTR basically sought to prohibit the sale of “illegally harvested timber” within the EU, and required businesses to verify that no laws had been violated in the course of cutting down any timber they brought to our markets.

That all sounds reasonable enough, but in 2010 the climatists were still gathering steam. Having gotten their foot in the door with the EUTR, they were soon dreaming of a bigger and better law to replace it, one which would attack deforestation much more comprehensively. They wanted a law that would ban not just timber, but a wide range of products that might be associated not only with the illegal cutting down of trees, but with “deforestation” and “forest degradation” in general. This new law would target wood, yes, but it would also go after other products like beef, cocoa, soy, palm oil, coffee, tyres, chocolate, leather and furniture. Anybody bringing these commodities to market in the EU should have to “prove that the products do not originate from recently deforested land or have contributed to forest degradation.” This new draft legislation would really put a stop to deforestation, they thought, and so in May 2023 – largely out sight and with nobody paying attention – the EU Parliament and the member states made the EU Regulation on Deforestation Free Products the 1,115th regulation passed that year. Imagine how good it must have felt, to vote in favour of the EU Regulation on Deforestation Free Products. All you had to do that day as a humble MEP was show up for work, express your support for this shiny new law, and just like that, you were Protecting Our Planet’s Trees.

That feeling did not last very long. As I write this, basically nobody thinks the Deforestation Regulation is a good idea any longer. Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, is against it, as are (according to Welt) 20 other EU heads of government (the EU only has 27 member states). The United States thinks it is a bad idea and all of South America thinks it is a terrible idea. Even the Greens think it is stupid now. Still more amazing, a lot of people in Brussels in the very same legislative and executive bodies that passed this law in 2023, have now also decided that their own law is shit. Last year, Christophe Hansen of the European People’s Party justified the legislation by complaining that “our supermarket shelves are all too often filled with products that have been covered in the ashes of burnt rainforests and have destroyed the livelihoods of indigenous peoples.”¹ Now Hansen’s own party wants to suspend the legislation for which they themselves bear substantial responsibility.

There are two main reasons everybody is suffering from legislator’s remorse. First of all, nobody knows how to implement the law without miring entire industries in mountains of useless paperwork and expanding the cancerous Brussels bureaucracy still further:

“The regulation pursues a very legitimate goal,” says Peter Liese, a CDU member of the European Parliament and environmental policy maker from South Westphalia. “But in its current form, it is a bureaucratic monster.” Dozens of industries are affected. And some are at risk of being overwhelmed. “In my constituency, there is a medium-sized roaster that has been producing fair-trade organic coffee for over 30 years and has good supplier relationships in Central America,” says Liese. “The small farmers who supply it and who operate in an exemplary manner cannot cope with the instruments.”

“The deforestation regulation is part of a series of extremely anti-competitive regulations,” says Thilo Brodtmann, managing director of the German Engineering Federation … “The EU is overburdening companies with unmanageable, completely excessive requirements.”

The second reason is that the law is a slap in the face to Europe’s trade partners:

Recently, the US government called on Brussels to delay the law’s entry into force because many American companies are not yet ready. Brazil also finds it intrusive and fears economic damage. According to the government, a third of exports to the EU would be affected by the new regulation. For example, steaks for Europe would no longer be allowed to come from cattle that grazed where the jungle was growing until a few years ago.

The deforestation regulation even threatens the planned free trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur economic community, which includes Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and, more recently, Bolivia. Talks have been ongoing for more than 25 years and are expected to be concluded in the coming months. EuropeÄs economy is hoping for the deal. After all, the new free trade area would encompass almost 800 million people.

Think about that: largely out of sight and with little public comment, Eurocrats passed an insane piece of environmental legislation last year that threatens to disrupt a third of Brazilian exports to Europe and that is endangering a free trade agreement with South America that has been in the works for a quarter century. They did this while full of fulminous rhetoric about burnt rainforest ash in our grocery stores, and without the slightest idea of how the law would work, its downstream effects on the European economy and international trade relations, or really anything else. Now that German industry is dying and Europeans don’t feel as prosperous as they did when the Forest Regulation was devised, everybody wants it to go away, but it’s still on the books, as the 1,115th dumb thing the EU did in 2023, and nobody has any idea what to do now.

Herr, die Not ist groß!
Die ich rief, die Geister
Werd’ ich nun nicht los.

1. This and subsequent quotations from the Welt article linked above.