ICMSA: New EU deforestation law ‘makes mockery' of simplification
The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers' Association (ICMSA) has said that the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) 'makes a mockery' out of the EU's efforts to simplify regulations for farms and businesses.
The aim of the EU Deforestation Regulation, according to the European Commission, is to ensure that goods in the EU market do not contribute to deforestation and forest degradation, both within the EU and globally.
The new regulation means that companies will only be allowed to sell products in the EU if the supplier provides a 'due diligence' statement confirming that the product does not come from deforested land or has led to forest degradation.
The regulation was set to come into effect at the end of 2024. However, this was deferred until the end of 2025, and mid-2026 for smaller businesses.
Despite that deferral, the ICMSA has claimed that the commission will 'have zero credibility with farmers on their much-hyped simplification process…if they proceed with the EU Deforestation Regulation as currently structured'.
The chairperson of ICMSA's Livestock Committee, Michael O'Connell, remarked that the requirements of the EDUR are 'illogical, dizzyingly complex, make no sense, and place an unacceptable burden on farmers'.
'It is surely not too much to ask the commission to decide one way or the other what they are trying to do. The new level of administration and form-filling involved in the deforestation regulation makes a mockery of the so-called simplification process,' he said.
The vast majority of farmland in Ireland has been declared on the [basic payment] system all the way back to 1994, so there's over 30 years of records along with an inspection regime that means the Department [of Agriculture, Food and the Marine] has excellent data on every parcel of land and its usage.
'What the EU Deforestation Regulation will involve is effectively to ignore all this data and implement a new regime where farmers will have to declare annually where their cattle are grazing or their feed is coming? What about the information that we've been giving them for the last 30 years? Why can't they use that?' O' Connell commented.
'We're being asked to start from scratch again and comply with yet another additional administration system; a whole new regulatory regime that will almost certainly cause serious problems when introduced and which ultimately will not achieve its objective,' he added.
The ICMSA is calling for the EU to allow the department to utilise this data and use it to pre-approve or reject farmers under the EUDR for 2026.
'They have the data and it is simply a case of verifying it. There should be absolutely no requirement on pre-approved farmers to submit documentation or otherwise and the produce from their farms should be marketed as normal,' O' Connell said.
He added: 'ICMSA cannot understand the logic of the EU Commission of introducing a ridiculously complex system on top of the system that's already giving them the data they need to make the decisions.'
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