- EU’s Director General for Trade Sabine Weyand has questioned the EU’s approach on the EUDR, stating that it has “pushed away” trade partners and that Brussels needs to “learn lessons”;
- Weyand also said that the EU’s existing approach on sustainability in FTAs will not work with Indonesia;
- The comments follow a leaked internal EU memo that says the EU “must moderate the sustainability approach of its FTA agenda”;
- And Europe’s leading trade commentator has compared the EUDR approach to colonial-era policies.
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Sabine Weyand, the European Commission’s Director General for Trade has bluntly questioned the bloc’s handling of the EUDR with its trading partners.
At an event at the Institute for International and European Affairs this week, Brussels’ top trade official acknowledged that the EUDR – and its approach to trade and sustainability — had created significant problems for its standing in the world. Weyland remarked:
“We should learn some lessons from the opposition we are currently facing with respect to the deforestation regulation … we have to recognize that the means are extremely burdensome and very difficult to meet for developing countries and notably for small and medium sized businesses and smallholders in these countries.”
“We have pushed away a number of partners we need through our increased use of autonomous trade measures; unilateral measures that other countries see as imposing on them extra-territorial effects of our legislation. And they resent that.
“We hear that increasingly on measures like the deforestation regulation … there are huge concerns. So we need to think about our attractiveness for our trading partners.”
“The Global South and the emerging and developing economies, they do not simply want to copy our legislation and they say, who has appointed you world regulator? So I think we have to take on regulatory cooperation. We have to take a proper cooperative approach.”
Weyand also acknowledged that the EU’s approach on sustainability in trade agreements is effectively halting progress on the Indonesia-EU FTA. The reason? The EU’s sanctions-based approach in FTAs, where the EU adds an additional compliance burden for partners based on sustainability.
Weyland simply said: “It is clear that we will not be able to have such an approach with India and Indonesia.”
The comments come on the heels of a leaked internal EU briefing from the Commission’s Director General for International Partnerships, which also took a swing at the EU’s approach to trade and environment and its impact on trading partners. The document says that the EU should:
“Thoroughly assess[] the impact of EU environmental regulations on our partners and mitigate[] negative externalities. Going forward it will be key to impact-assess environmental regulations before these are agreed upon and in a holistic manner, better considering their cumulative impacts, particularly on partner countries. The 46 Least Developed Countries are for instance important partners for the EU when it comes to our geopolitical positioning.”
These remarks also coincide with comments from former John Clarke, the former Director of International Relations at the European Commission. Clarke’s opinion piece in Euronews this week stated:
“The EU must moderate the sustainability aspect of its FTAs agenda and engage with partners on climate and environmental challenges — of which farmers are the first victims…
“And it needs evidence-based information on issues like the environmental or climate footprint of Brazilian beef (far less than the media might ask you to believe). Ditto palm oil from Indonesia or Nigeria. Or the impact of glyphosate.
The EU must decide how far to press its Green Deal agenda in trade. The EU’s own backtracking means it cannot insist with partners on commitments it cannot deliver itself…
The EU needs to think — as it finesses its strategy on trade — about the other pillars of sustainability: not just the environment, not just European farmers, but also developing country producers on whom we depend for our future food security. Sustainability has three pillars.”
Alan Beattie of the Financial Times, arguably the world’s most widely read trade columnist, didn’t pull any punches in a week that was highly critical of the Brussels approach, comparing it to colonial-era policies – something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago in Western media.
Beattie wrote in his ‘Trade Secrets’ column this week:
“Indonesian accusations of oppression by Europeans are being aired again, this time over Brussels’ demands that palm oil producers prove that their exports to the EU do not cause deforestation. Indonesia’s economy minister has accused the EU of “regulatory imperialism”; the Indonesian foreign ministry’s videoed annual address last year contained an image of a jackboot marked with the EU logo stamping on a palm oil plantation.
“Indonesia won its independence from the Netherlands (which, like the rest of western Europe, razed most of its own forests centuries ago in the process of getting rich) in a bloody war in the 1940s. But the country’s palm-oil growers are still being forced to follow rules dictated in Europe. Large-scale foreign-owned producers such as Socfin will almost certainly find it easier to comply than will Indonesian smallholders.”
Framed like that, you can see how the EU’s pious insistence that its trade policy furthers “European values” might grate just a tiny little bit.”
Is something shifting in Brussels? These comments come during a high-level meeting between Indonesian and European officials that seek to clear the air on a broad swathe of trade matters, including the bilateral agreement, the five WTO cases between the EU and Indonesia, as well as the EUDR.
There’s much at stake for Brussels now, and the divisions within the EU Commission appear to be getting wider on the EUDR as the election approaches. And we’ll have more on that next week.