EU Deforestation Law Faces Another Delay After Long, Tense Negotiations

Key Takeaways

• One-Year Delay Agreed: Large operators now face a December 30, 2026 deadline; small and micro businesses have until June 30, 2027.
• Simplified Due Diligence: Only the first operator placing goods on the EU market must file a due diligence statement; downstream traders pass along a reference number.
• Small Operators Get Relief: Farmers and small primary operators will only need to file a one-time simplified declaration.
• Ambition vs. Practicality Clash: NGOs warn repeated postponements risk weakening one of the EU’s most ambitious forest-protection laws, while businesses caution that shifting timelines add costly uncertainty.
• Not Final Yet: The deal must be endorsed and published before end-2025 or the original earlier deadlines automatically return.

Deep Dive

The EU’s deforestation law, already the subject of years of political wrangling and industry pushback, is heading for yet another delayed start and a more streamlined design, after Parliament and Council negotiators reached a provisional agreement to postpone and simplify its core requirements.

Under the deal struck Thursday evening, large operators and traders will now need to comply with the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) from 30 December 2026, while micro- and small enterprises have until 30 June 2027. All businesses effectively gain an extra year on top of the timeline set when the law was adopted in 2023.

The delay is framed as a practical step to avoid a rocky rollout and to give more time to upgrade the EU’s IT system used for submitting electronic due diligence statements. Competent authorities will also be required to share information on any significant technical errors or disruptions affecting that system, in an effort to prevent outages from derailing compliance.

Parliament’s rapporteur, Christine Schneider, stressed that “the heart of the EU deforestation regulation remains intact,” arguing that the deal still protects forests at real risk of deforestation while “ensuring that the regulation can be implemented in a practical and workable way.”

Simplification Aimed at Reducing Administrative Burden

Negotiators also agreed to reshape how due diligence works along the supply chain. Responsibility for submitting due diligence statements will now sit with the business first placing a relevant product on the EU market, rather than with every operator and trader that subsequently commercializes it. Downstream traders will rely on the reference number linked to that initial submission instead of filing their own.

For micro and small primary operators, requirements are scaled back further: they will only need to submit a one-off simplified declaration, rather than repeated filings, a change intended to ease the burden on farmers and foresters without formally weakening the regulation’s objectives.

The European Commission must present a report by 30 April 2026 assessing the regulation’s impact and administrative burden, with particular attention to micro and small operators.

In a notable carve-out, printed products will be excluded from the law’s scope altogether, after Parliament pushed to narrow coverage to areas with clearer deforestation risk.

A Long Road Marked by Opposition on All Sides

This latest deal is just the newest chapter in a long and increasingly fraught process.

Ever since the regulation was adopted in 2023, the implementation debate has been pulled in two directions:

• Business groups, including major food and consumer brands, warn that shifting timelines and design tweaks risk undoing readiness investments, stalling farm-level traceability projects and prolonging planning uncertainty. Many would have preferred a time-limited grace period and flexible enforcement rather than a full reset of compliance dates.
• Environmental organizations see the opposite threat. Groups such as WWF argue that ongoing postponements risk blunting one of the EU’s strongest tools for protecting forests and biodiversity. Every adjustment, in their view, chips away at what made the law ambitious in the first place and sends a signal that political will is softening.

Those tensions sit against stark underlying numbers. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 420 million hectares of forest were lost to deforestation between 1990 and 2020, an area larger than the EU itself. EU consumption is thought to drive around 10% of global deforestation, with palm oil and soya responsible for more than two-thirds of that footprint.

The political question hanging over this latest compromise is whether added flexibility will genuinely improve implementation or simply extend a pattern of delay.

The Delay Still Isn’t a Done Deal Yet

The provisional agreement now moves to the European Parliament’s 15–18 December 2025 plenary session for a vote. It must then be endorsed by the Council and published in the EU’s Official Journal before the end of 2025 for the new dates and simplifications to take effect.

If that doesn’t happen, the current, earlier deadlines, including 2025 and mid-2026 application dates, will remain in place.

The EU set out to build a deforestation-free trade regime that matched the scale of the problem. After multiple rounds of negotiations, delayed timelines, technical debates, and political compromises, this latest deal is an attempt to land that ambition in a way businesses say they can actually implement, while NGO critics warn that every extra year on paper represents another year of forest loss on the ground.

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