The European Union’s anti-deforestation law (EUDR) will come into effect on Dec. 30, 2025, after a one-year postponement. It requires producers of soy, cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber and timber to prove that their products are not sourced from land deforested after December 2020. The law has been praised as a landmark tool for curbing forest loss, but it could unintentionally harm smallholders, disrupt agroforestry systems, and shift deforestation into other ecosystems, Mongabay contributor Sean Mowbray reported. Smallholder ‘blindness’ The EUDR requires producers to provide GPS information and proof of land tenure, but many smallholders lack those formal documents or the resources to comply. Experts warn that excluding these producers from the EU market could deepen rural poverty and inequality. “The [EUDR] provisions on smallholders are really scarce … the legislation is basically smallholder blind,” Fanny Gauttier, European public affairs lead at the Rainforest Alliance, a nonprofit, told Mowbray by email. “It’s the marginalized groups, ethnic minorities and women’s groups, who will face the largest potential exclusion,” said Martin Greijmans, senior program officer at the Regional Community Forestry Training Centre for Asia and the Pacific. Agroforestry overlooked The EUDR’s strict definition of a forest could risk misclassifying agroforestry systems as noncompliant. Ethiopian coffee grown under a forest canopy, or Indonesian rubber, largely grown in agroforestry systems, could be cut off from EU markets, one expert warned. Meine van Noordwijk, a research fellow at World Agroforestry, found that EU forest maps show 12% more forest cover than national data, largely…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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