Virginijus Sinkevičius, who is former EU environment commissioner has warned against going back on the protection of nature and the battle against the climate crisis after the bloc decided to delay its landmark deforestation law.
Sinkevičius, the Lithuanian MEP and a vice-president of the European parliament’s Green group, said he disagreed with the decision to amend the deforestation law in order to give companies a year of extra time to ensure their products are not implicated in the felling of trees.
Every EU law “is born through a very difficult negotiation where everyone needs to give ground a bit”, he told the Guardian. “A last-minute change does not give credibility to the EU’s decision-making.”
Sinkevičius, who was EU environment commissioner for nearly five years until July, was responsible for drafting the legislation, which will ban the sale in the EU of commodities linked to deforestation such as cocoa, coffee, soy, palm oil and rubber, as well as products, including chocolate, leather and furniture.
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Last month, the EU agreed a one-year delay to the lawafter intensive lobbying from industry and forested countries around the world. Sinkevičius said problems with implementing the law could have been tackled with a grace period, rather than reopening negotiations between EU lawmakers. “That additional year was a bit of a reward to those who did not try hard enough in order to comply with the legislation,” he said.
Some of the biggest companies, he said, were waiting for the law to apply, because it brings “fair competition”. He said businesses that were trying to avoid deforestation faced additional costs, against competitors that would “cut corners” on nature protection and yet “be on the same shelf in the shop”.
In 2023, 6.37m hectares of forests worldwide were lost to cattle raising, crop growing, mining, road building or devastating fires among other causes, according to the Forest Declaration Assessment.
Sinkevičius was speaking at the start of a new five-year term for the EU institutions, with growing pressure to roll back elements of the green agenda. MEPs in the European parliament, which has a record number of far-right lawmakers, have proposed cancelling the 2035 ban on selling petrol and diesel cars, as well as suspending pollution trading (a CO2 reduction strategy) for heavy industry.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
