BRASÍLIA — The European Union’s new antideforestation law banning the import of products linked to recently deforested land has triggered opposing reactions from Brazil’s environmental and agribusiness authorities. The country’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock has criticized the law, known as the EUDR, and was among the groups that successfully pressured the EU to postpone its implementation by a year. Conversely, Brazil’s federal environmental agency, IBAMA, has welcomed the EUDR as an important instrument against deforestation and an opportunity to shift the country’s agribusiness industry toward greater traceability, transparency and sustainability.

Once it comes into effect in December 2025, the EUDR will require suppliers to prove that their products entering the EU market aren’t sourced from areas that were deforested after December 2020. The regulation was adopted in response to increasing claims of products imported into the EU being linked to illegal deforestation, including in the Amazon Rainforest. It targets products containing one of seven commodities historically produced on deforested land: soy, cattle, rubber, palm oil, coffee, cocoa and timber.

For IBAMA president Rodrigo Agostinho, although the EUDR should have been focused on the main drivers of deforestation in Brazil — soy and cattle — it still represents an opportunity for all the targeted sectors to transform their production model in the Amazon and other biomes.

“They’re starting to invest a lot in traceability and environmental regularization, [and] compliance, things they didn’t use to do,” Agostinho told Mongabay at IBAMA’s headquarters in Brasília.

These measures won’t just allow Brazilian producers to continue exporting to Europe but also to other global markets where demand for sustainably produced goods is increasing, he added.

“In consumer markets all over the world, consumers want to know if they are leaving a trail of destruction, they want to know if the product they are buying is destroying the Amazon, is causing global warming, and I think we really have an opportunity to transform that,” Agostinho said.

While certain countries see the EUDR as a commercial barrier, Agostinho said it’s a great opportunity for the economic sectors involved to change their production models to focus on “traceability, transparency, compliance, respect for social rights, respect for the environment, and environmental regularization of these farms.”

He said IBAMA isn’t interested to sanction every producer operating in the Amazon. Instead, he went on, it would be preferable for these producers to make their businesses legal, recover protected areas, and comply with environmental laws.

Nilto Tatto, a lawmaker who heads the environmental caucus in Brazil’s lower house of Congress, also welcomed the EUDR and said it should have come into effect immediately.

“I don’t think we have to fight against the European law, we have to do our part here,” he told Mongabay at his office in the National Congress in Brasília. “We need to do our homework here when it comes to environmental protection.”

Agriculture is the main driver of greenhouse gas emissions from land-use change in Brazil, built on a decades-long development model that promotes expansion into new areas, he said.

“There’s no need to deforest anymore,” Tatto said. “It’s important to have legislation that restricts it, because we know that we already have technology and we can make better use of what Brazil already has in terms of deforest[ed land] to produce much more [in these areas].”

He called the EUDR a breakthrough in tackling the climate crisis worldwide and particularly in Brazil, which plays a key role in global food production.

The pressure that agribusiness put on the government to push for the EUDR delay speaks of how powerful the industry is, Tatto added.

“If you had the opportunity to ask [President] Lula, he [would say that he] doesn’t see any problem with the legislation coming into effect,” he said. “But it’s not like that.”

He also pointed to the agribusiness caucus in the legislature, the so-called ruralistas who make up the majority in the National Congress. “We have serious problems here with this kind of agenda. And there ends up being a lot of pressure on the government. It’s a real force.”

The Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment.

IBAMA’s Agostinho said Brazil’s role in helping get the EUDR postponed came down to the country’s renewed fight against deforestation under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who returned to office at the start of 2023.

Amazonian deforestation decreased by 30.6% for the year ending July 31, 2024, compared to the same period in 2023. Over that time, the Amazon Rainforest lost 6,288 square kilometers (2,428 square miles) — an area roughly the size of the U.S. state of Delaware — marking the lowest annual loss since 2015, according to datafrom the country’s national space research institute, INPE.

“I think IBAMA has a strong hand in this. It’s not IBAMA that negotiates the extension of the deadline, but it is IBAMA that fights deforestation,” Agostinho said.

“I particularly think that the European directive has been extended because of the figures for combating deforestation, but I think it could be an opportunity for people to become [complacent] —  it can’t go on like this,” he added. “We need to have traceability, we need to have the origin of the products. This origin needs to be lawful, it needs to be legal, it needs to respect the environment. That’s the big challenge.”

Banner image: Aerial view of an area in the Amazon deforested for cattle ranching — the biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon — in Lábrea, Amazonas state on Sep 15, 2021. Photo © Victor Moriyama / Amazônia em Chamas (Amazon in Flames Alliance)

Karla Mendesis a staff investigative and feature reporter for Mongabay in Brazil and a member of the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.She is the first Brazilian and Latin American ever elected to the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ); she was also nominated Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Chair. Read her stories published on Mongabay here. Find her on𝕏, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads and Bluesky.