Last week the European Commission proposed that it would be proposing to defer the implementation of the EU Deforestation Regulation by 12 months.
This is a win for Australian farmers, something that is becoming rarer and rarer for the people that produce our food.
The EU Deforestation Regulation would have meant that any beef, including leather, would not have been able to be exported to Europe if it was deemed to have spent any time on land that the EU determined had been deforested since 2021.
While these regulations may be well intentioned they did not consider any local laws in relation to land clearing, and assumed that farming practices in Australia are the same as they are in Europe. The problem with making this assumption that under the initial maps that were released by the EU 44 per cent of the land that was designated as forest in Australia has been grazed sustainably for generations and is recognised in Australia as agricultural land.
These maps were meant to factor in any land that had been agricultural land prior to 2021 but it became apparent when the maps were released Australia’s governments weren’t consulted on the land use for these maps.
We can hardly blame decision makers in Europe for not understanding Australian farming practices, but they shouldn’t be dictating to other countries on how they produce their products without understanding those differences.
But we shouldn’t be letting other nations trying to dictate what we can and can’t do in our nation. These regulations have a risk of setting a precedent of nations being dictated to on how they run their country by people who have no idea about them.
This is why last month the senate moved a bipartisan urgency motion, only the second urgency motion to be jointly sponsored by both the government and opposition parties of the day, to call on Europe to delay the implementation of these regulations.
These laws would have had flow on impacts to Australia’s economic growth, as they allowed no development of Australia’s land resources into the future. We’re a younger country than those of Europe and a lot of our land remains undeveloped, and Australian Governments have a plan to sustainably develop Northern Australia.
A lot of the land in Northern Australia that is yet to be developed is owned by indigenous Australians, and would have seen them more hurt by Europe’s regulations than most as they would have been locked out from developing their land if they wanted to sell into Europe.
And the European Parliament needs to take on board the Commission’s recommendations to delay the implementation of these regulations, because despite their good intentions they had the potential to create even more harm and disadvantage by dictating to other countries about how they do business rather than working with them to ensure that our natural environment is protected without causing undue harm to another country’s industry.
The European Union wouldn’t let Australia dictate how they operate their countries, just as we shouldn’t let them dictate to us and they should take on board their own Commission’s recommendation and delay these regulations for another year to give them time to ensure that these regulations are implemented in a way that won’t harm relationships with nations like Australia and the US that want to see a positive outcome without our producers being negatively impacted.
