Tropical forests and forest-risk commodities (FRCs): an integrated framework for the assessment of deforestation risks associated with the trade of FRCs in Europe

Despite the apparent decrease in global forest loss in the last few years, deforestation rates in tropical countries remain alarming. Deforestation drivers linked to agriculture expansion, wood extraction and infrastructure development, along with economic, political and social factors, have shaped how deforestation occurs in the tropics. They reflect the existing patterns, trends and actors involved in this matter. In this sense, the increasing demand for agricultural products that originate from tropical forest ecosystems is causing the expansion of the farming frontier in many countries by displacing forests. This is resulting in environmental and socio-economic issues that go from higher rates of biodiversity loss and the emission of greenhouse gases to increased corruption in forest-related sectors and social conflicts. More specifically, a telecoupling perspective allows seeing that the demand for forest risk commodities (FRCs) from powerful economies such as the European Union, the United Kingdom and China makes international trade a major responsible for deforestation in producing countries in the tropics. Recently, in order to reduce deforestation attributed to forest risk commodities such as cocoa, coffee, oil palm, soy, beef and wood, the EU published a proposal for a regulation on deforestation-free products. This proposal aims to prevent products originating from deforestation sources from entering the EU market or being exported from it by establishing a due diligence procedure that would ensure a negligible risk of non-compliance. Operators would have to ensure that their products are deforestation-free and that they were produced following the relevant legislation of the country of production. In this context, this study addresses the first point of compliance from a broad perspective by proposing an integrated framework for assessing the deforestation risk embedded in FRCs exported from tropical countries into the EU market. The top 15 exporters of 12 commodities related to cocoa, coffee, soy and oil palm were chosen to carry out the deforestation risk assessment for each country and product, based on trade data from 2003 to 2020. Furthermore, a social network analysis was included to display the relationships between producing/exporting countries and importing countries in terms of the relevance and role of certain actors in the trade of FRCs. The results show that the exports of FRCs into the EU market are causing extensive deforestation for their production due to cropland expansion, especially in Indonesia and Malaysia for palm oil, in Brazil and Paraguay for soybean, in Cotê d’Ivoire and Indonesia for cocoa, and in Tanzania and Indonesia for coffee. Other tropical countries, such as Malaysia, Colombia, Papua New Guinea, Honduras and Peru, also display concerning deforestation figures attributed to EU imports of FRCs. Furthermore, the results reveal that EU countries with prominent port and/or processing facilities and big industries, such as the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, are importing the largest shares of FRCs from tropical countries among other EU countries. Relationships among producing/exporting and importing countries are basically condensed into a few countries, making them the main actors in the supply chain of these FRCs and, thus, the ones that should be taking more extensive measures towards a shift to a deforestation-free supply chain.