The European Union’s anti-deforestation law (EUDR) will come into effect on Dec. 30, 2025, after a one-year postponement. It requires producers of soy, cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber and timber to prove that their products are not sourced from land deforested after December 2020.

The law has been praised as a landmark tool for curbing forest loss, but it could unintentionally harm smallholders, disrupt agroforestry systems, and shift deforestation into other ecosystems, Mongabay contributor Sean Mowbray reported.

Smallholder ‘blindness’

The EUDR requires producers to provide GPS information and proof of land tenure, but many smallholders lack those formal documents or the resources to comply. Experts warn that excluding these producers from the EU market could deepen rural poverty and inequality.

“The [EUDR] provisions on smallholders are really scarce … the legislation is basically smallholder blind,” Fanny Gauttier, European public affairs lead at the Rainforest Alliance, a nonprofit, told Mowbray by email.

“It’s the marginalized groups, ethnic minorities and women’s groups, who will face the largest potential exclusion,” said Martin Greijmans, senior program officer at the Regional Community Forestry Training Centre for Asia and the Pacific.

Agroforestry overlooked

The EUDR’s strict definition of a forest could risk misclassifying agroforestry systems as noncompliant. Ethiopian coffee grown under a forest canopy, or Indonesian rubber, largely grown in agroforestry systems, could be cut off from EU markets, one expert warned.

Meine van Noordwijk, a research fellow at World Agroforestry, found that EU forest maps show 12% more forest cover than national data, largely because agroforestry plots are counted as forest.

“If you care about where your coffee, cacao, rubber, etc., comes from, you would quickly see that for some commodities, agroforestry is an important part of the production systems that you’re trying to regulate,” van Noordwijk said.

Leakage and spillover

A focus on forest ecosystems could push land-clearing to other biomes, such as wetlands and savannas. Instead of reducing environmental damage, it could simply shift it to areas outside EUDR protections.

“This is probably the biggest risk, because that would essentially mean that the legislation is not having the desired effect on the ground,” Matthew Sielski, senior policy adviser for deforestation and trade at The Nature Conservancy, told Mowbray by phone. The Amazon soy moratorium, for example, reduced deforestation in the Amazon, but increased deforestation in the neighboring Cerrado savanna.

Some of the targeted commodities, such as palm oil and soy, may bypass the European market altogether, as producers choose to sell to other nations with looser regulations.

A recent paper on palm oil and soy found that EU restrictions alone would be unlikely to drive major emission reductions from deforestation in both supply chains.

“If other countries were to adopt similar restrictions, there could be a larger impact,” said lead author Brinda Yarlagadda from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Read the full story by Sean Mowbray here.

Banner image: Rubber agroforestry in Indonesia. Image by Tri Saputro/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).