One of Europe’s largest coffee companies has called for further delays to the EUDR, claiming that the new policy will disrupt supply chains and hike up prices. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Lavazza Chairman Giuseppe Lavazza called for another postponement:
“We call that the legislation, especially for coffee, to be postponed for another year,” he said. Lavazza highlighted that the cocoa industry was better prepared than the coffee industry, as there are fewer producing countries. He went on to say that the regulation could potentially be more damaging than Trump’s tariffs, given that countries like Ethiopia could find it challenging to comply due to the lack of clarity around land ownership.
Lavazza’s concerns come as Wood Central’s yesterday reported that a majority of MEPs in the European Parliament voted to reject the EUDR’s country benchmarking system, a move that could delay the rollout of the EUDR later this year. The motion, led by Alexander Bernhuber of the European People’s Party (EPP) argued that system suffered from a flaws, including the use of outdated data that “does not accurately reflect the current realities in the countries concerned,” and “fails to consider key real-world factors, most notably current land-use dynamics and forest degradation,” resulting in countries being placed in higher risk categories.
Last year, Wood Central revealed that global coffee importers are scaling back and walking away from Africa, with producers trading small African landowners for “rich Brazilian farmers” as commodity markets prepare for the EUDR. Reuters reported that industry insiders had cited a “drying up of orders” from Ethiopia, where 5 million farming families rely on the crop.
“I see no way of buying significant quantities of Ethiopian coffee going forward,” according to Johannes Dengler, an executive at German roaster Dallmayr, which buys about 1% of the world’s exported coffee.
- To learn more about the country benchmarking system, click here to read Wood Central’s exclusive interview with Marigold Walkins and Kerstin Canby from Forest Trends last month.
