Europe Cleared Its Forests. Now It Writes the Rules.

 

Europe cleared its forests, then wrote the rules for how other nations should treat theirs. The EUDR is good in theory, but we must not hinder growth or hold another nation hostage to market access in pursuit of a virtue signal.

The Date Buried in the Regulation

There is a date buried in the EU deforestation regulation that some would argue is doomsday: December 31, 2020.

Coffee, cocoa, rubber, palm, soy, timber and cattle products entering the European Union have to be proven, plot by plot and GPS polygon by GPS polygon, to come from land that was not deforested after that date. Land cleared before it? You’re good to go. Land cleared after that date? Well, consider yourself on the outside looking in because you will be locked out of the EU market.

I think the EUDR means well, even if some of it comes across as virtue signaling. But of course I must ask—

Where were those ground rules when Europe was setting up its own civilization?

If you look at Europe, it has cleared much of its forests over roughly two thousand years. Oaks went into ships. Beech went into charcoal. Other forests became fields and pastures, which eventually became cities. The farmlands that feed Europe, the cities that vote for its parliament, and the industrial base that made it rich are all part of that cleared landscape today. No country in Europe owes anyone a modern due-diligence statement proving that the land was not originally forest.

Now Africa is entering its own industrial era. Who is to stop us from turning our own areas into civilizations and cities, just as Europe did?

The History Isn’t a Gotcha.

It’s part of the Ledger.

The Argument Is Not That the Forests Should Disappear

The forests are real. The clearing is real. Nobody here is going to argue that the Upper Guinea forest belt should go away the way the European oak forests went away.

We have occupied our land for a very long time, and we understand our land. We’ve lived with it, farmed it and built our communities around it.

We’re not arguing for the destruction of the forest; we are arguing about who gets to decide how and when African nations develop.

Maybe the regulation is trying to curb corruption. Maybe it is trying to create a more transparent supply chain. Those are legitimate goals. But that does not automatically make this the right way to achieve them. Telling us how and when to improve our nation is a different thing.

And let’s be honest about another reality: we do not have the infrastructure to clear our forests at anything remotely resembling the scale that Europe did. We don’t have that machinery, that capital, those roads, or that industrial capacity. Our relationship with the land is too deep for that.

That is why protecting forests and allowing development should not have to be treated as mutually exclusive.

The Honest Objection: Who Pays?

The honest objection isn’t the goal.

It’s who pays for it.

EUDR compliance means plot-level geolocation and due-diligence information ultimately has to be submitted into the EU information system. Why can’t that information originate at origin? Why can’t it be in our own database? If the objective is traceability, why can’t producing countries build and own the primary systems and make them interoperable with the markets that want access to them?

For Nestlé, this can be a software procurement decision. For a two-hectare Liberian farmer in Bong County, it can be a wall and a hurdle. After all, they didn’t clear any forest after 2020 and are farming their own land. They know their plot… their community knows their plot. The land may have been farmed for generations. But they may not be able to prove it in the exact digital format that Brussels requires.

And that changes the nature of the commodity. The proof is now a product. The coffee, cocoa or rubber is one product. The documentation, mapping, verification and digital proof required to move that product into a particular market becomes another economic undertaking that’s attached to it.

So we have to watch what the regulation actually selects for.

Does it select farmers who clear the least forest?

Or does it select operators who can afford the most paperwork?

Those are not necessarily the same people.

Large plantations with GIS departments will be able to comply more easily. Companies with capital can hire specialists, purchase software, maintain databases, map their land and absorb compliance costs. And importers facing tens of thousands of smallholder polygons may decide that the administrative burden is simply too high. It becomes easier to buy from one vertically integrated operator than to map, verify and maintain relationships with thousands of independent farmers.

The farmer may not be excluded because they deforested. They may be excluded because proving that they did not is too much work.

That is the wall.

Good In Theory, But Is It Good for Origin?

And this is where the argument gets uncomfortable.

The EU seems to know some of this already. The regulation has been delayed twice. It now applies to large and medium operators from December 2026, with small and micro enterprises receiving additional time into mid-2027. What it looks like is that they are now discovering, late in the process, that their rules land on real people who were not necessarily pictured when the rules were being written.

Where we sit right now, we will keep the quiet part quiet. Narrowly, the EUDR is good for WAFI. After all, we own our lands. We know our plots. Traceability to origin is not something new to us. It is the entire premise of the company. When the regulation applies at the end of the year, our coffee should be okay. It should be clear. No problem. And that is exactly why we don’t cheer for it. A rule can be good for us and still be bad for the market. A rule that advantages vertically integrated operators over independent smallholder farmers who do not have the infrastructure to comply can end up concentrating the market.

And market concentration is bad for origin, even when it is good for us.

We want WAFI to succeed. But we also want more farmers participating in formal international markets, not fewer. We want more independent producers to have access to buyers, more value staying at origin, and farmers to have more choices about who they sell to. Because competition matters. If several buyers want a farmer’s crop, that farmer has choices.

The regulation may improve traceability while simultaneously creating another barrier to entry.

That is the part we should be watching.

The Ledger

This is not an argument against conservation. It is an argument about development, sovereignty and who bears the cost of environmental policy.

If a farmer is asked not to develop land, there needs to be a viable economic reason for keeping that land standing. If a country is asked to preserve forests while developing its economy, there needs to be a pathway to development that does not simply push the cost onto the producer.

Otherwise, the message becomes very simple:

You developed. Now don’t.

If the problem is corruption, then we must build better land registries. Also, if the problem is illegal clearing, we must improve the law and enforce it.

After all, it’s a free world, so if satellite imagery can verify land-use change, use it. In that same breath, if cooperatives can aggregate small farmers, let them.

There is a fundamental difference between saying “we want to know where your commodity came from” and saying “we will only recognize your commodity if you can prove its origin through our system.” The first is traceability. The second is market power.

The system should help a two-hectare farmer prove what they already know to be true. It should not make the inability to digitize that truth indistinguishable from wrongdoing.

Europe converted forests into economic capital. Africa is now trying to build its own economic capital. The question is whether Africa can be allowed to become prosperous while deciding for itself what parts of its land it protects, what parts it develops, and how it builds the civilization that comes next.

Because concentration is bad for origin, even when it is good for us.

That is the conversation we think is worth having.