The European Parliament has voted to end the European Union’s timber oversight partnership with Liberia, closing a decade-long effort to reform one of West Africa’s most opaque forest sectors through foreign aid. That is according to Mongabay, the environmental news outlet, which reported the motion passed with 92 per cent in favour, clearing the way for Brussels to formally terminate the agreement.
Signed in December 2013, the Voluntary Partnership Agreement was a centrepiece of the EU’s FLEGT action plan to curb illegal harvesting and deforestation across timber-exporting nations. It bankrolled tracking and transparency systems for Liberian shipments and required the government to verify that every log leaving its ports had been felled legally.
Under the terms of the deal, Liberia also committed to giving local environmental groups room to monitor compliance, opening up a watchdog role in a trade long associated with corruption and mismanagement. Eight other countries signed comparable agreements, four of them in Africa.
More than a decade on, the agreement’s central promise — a licensing system that would clear Liberian timber for EU markets as verified legal — was never delivered. After repeated missed deadlines, the European Commission recommended last year that the partnership be cancelled.
Environmental groups pushed back against that recommendation, arguing the agreement had been invaluable in prising open a notoriously closed timber trade despite its flaws. A coalition of civil society organisations, ten of them Liberian, said the process had created governance structures that took years to build.
Former Liberian president and Nobel laureate Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf added her weight to the campaign last year, warning in a Guardian opinion piece that a return to harvesting could cost the country far more than its forests. Her appeal, like the wider civil society push, failed to sway the Parliament’s centre-right.
The decision split the chamber along party lines when it reached the floor on 17 June, according to Jean-Marc Germain, a French member of the European Parliament. The Socialists and Democrats opposed the cancellation, he said, before a majority composed of centrist, right-wing and far-right parties chose to press ahead.
The Liberia vote follows the EU’s termination of a comparable partnership with Cameroon last year, part of a wider retreat from governance-led reform toward trade and compliance with new deforestation rules. Those rules, set out in the EU Deforestation Regulation, take effect from December after Brussels struck an eleventh-hour deal to delay them by twelve months.
According to the Brussels-based NGO FERN, the VPAs will likely give way to lighter-touch Forest Partnerships that carry fewer obligations and no formal oversight role for community watchdogs. Alexandra Benjamin, FERN’s forest governance policy adviser, said there has been no structured way for civil society to shape those partnerships.
