The world’s two largest producers of palm oil, Indonesia and Malaysia, intend to send representatives to the European Union to talk about how the new EU deforestation law will affect their palm oil industries, ministers from the Southeast Asian nations said on Thursday.
The EU adopted a deforestation law in December that mandates businesses to produce a due diligence statement indicating when and where their commodities were produced as well as ‘verifiable’ proof that they were not grown on land cleared for development after 2020, failing which they risk severe fines.
Environmentalists have hailed the regulation as a crucial step towards protecting forests because deforestation contributes to 10% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
To discuss the following steps, Malaysia’s Minister for Commodities Fadillah Yusof and Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto met on Thursday.
According to Airlangga, ‘We decided to conduct a joint mission to the EU to communicate, prevent unintended consequences of the regulation on the palm oil sector, and to seek out potential cooperative approaches.’
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