- New EUDR guidance maintains impossible plot-level requirements for millions of small farms
- Certification schemes — including national programs — offered no meaningful compliance pathway
- Complex supply chains face binary pass/fail with no flexibility for minor gaps
The European Commission released its long-awaited EUDR guidance yesterday, and it’s exactly what palm oil producers feared: a technical document that papers over the regulation’s fundamental flaws still while excluding the world’s smallholders.
The 40-page document was supposed to clarify how smallholders could comply. Instead, it confirms they can’t. Every single plot — whether it’s 2 hectares in Sumatra or 0.5 hectares in Sabah — needs individual geolocation data. One missed plot out of thousands feeding a mill will mean the entire shipment is blocked from Europe.
The guidance has provided several examples that underline this point. One shows cocoa confectionery compliance only by assuming “all geolocations known” for multiple smallholdings. Anyone who’s worked with smallholders knows this is something of a fantasy. When 3,000 farmers deliver fresh fruit bunches to a mill, tracking each plot isn’t just difficult — it’s operationally impossible.
Of course,it gets worse. The guidance doesn’t endorse national certification schemes, the very mechanism that allows smallholders to participate in certified supply chains. Indonesia’s ISPO and Malaysia’s MSPO are still relegated to “supporting evidence”.
The Commission acknowledges these national schemes could help smallholder integration but offers no clear regulatory pathway to recognize them.
This means countries that have invested millions in mandatory national certification systems — often at the EU’s urging — get nothing in return. The promised “repository of practices” is just an information portal, not a compliance mechanism.
For downstream operators handling composite products, the regulatory absurdity continues. One example shows paper and timber products blocked if even one wood species is unidentified, with no thresholds. No proportionality based on volume share. Again, one missing data point among hundreds of inputs means market exclusion.
The guidance identifies supply chain complexity as a risk factor but provides zero objective thresholds or safe harbors. There’s not actual way of determining when due diligence is “enough.”
What Brussels doesn’t grasp — or chooses to ignore — is that this isn’t about large plantations adjusting their paperwork. This is about millions of smallholder families across Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America – and even Europe — being systematically excluded from global trade.
The Commission keeps insisting the EUDR doesn’t ban any country or commodity. This is technically true but ractically meaningless. When you set compliance standards that are impossible for smallholders to meet, this is a de facto ban on their participation.
More than anything else, this is a lost opportunity.
The Commission had an opportunity with this guidance to show flexibility, to recognize the realities of smallholder agriculture, to provide genuine pathways to compliance. It also would have thrown a bone to their own agricultural lobbies, who are mobilising against it.
Instead, they’ve doubled down on an approach that will exclude the world’s most vulnerable farmers while doing little to protect forests.
As one observer put it to POM recently: “They want palm oil to meet standards that European olive oil and butter could never achieve.”
Will any rules be relaxed going forward? EU Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen has already said he would support relaxation of the rules – particularly for EU countries. Euractiv has also pointed out that “Potential changes could be included in a simplification package aimed at farmers and foresters due this autumn.”
We’ll believe when we see it.