Forestry and its entire value chain must be explicitly included in the federal government’s reform drive, with farms, forests, and rural areas together covering 91 per cent of Germany’s land. That is according to an alliance the German Farmers’ Association counts at 40 farm, forestry, and rural bodies, in an open letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz published in full on Monday.
“Many businesses are not experiencing a normal cyclical downturn, but a cost-driven erosion of their competitiveness,” the letter states, with rising energy, fertiliser, wage, and social costs meeting growing regulatory demands. Whilst the signatories called the energy tax relief already agreed “an important signal”, they want lasting measures that cut costs and bring planning certainty to follow quickly.
“Rural areas are home and workplace for every second citizen,” the signatories say, naming farming, forestry, and the bioeconomy as sectors that form their economic backbone. The alliance describes those regions as “load-bearing pillars of our country”, warning that businesses and jobs come under pressure when high costs and additional regulation drive out production and investment.
Merz must now turn “announcements into concrete decisions”, the alliance says, prioritising measures that immediately enable growth and secure jobs and supply. They want competitiveness to “once again be the guiding principle of political action”, with every new rule facing a binding check on its practicality and cost.
Under a moratorium on new burdens, the alliance wants “no new documentation, reporting, or control obligations” and for the rules already in place to be cut back noticeably. Signatories also insist that “national special paths and tightening beyond European standards must be ruled out”, alongside practical fixes to building and emissions law.
It comes as the Bundesrat, the chamber of Germany’s 16 state governments, demanded on Friday that relief from the EU deforestation regulation (EUDR) be written into law for small forest owners. Merz himself wrote to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in July last year, calling for a zero-risk category to exclude German farming and forestry from its scope.
Europe’s biggest party, the European People’s Party (EPP), which includes Merz’s Christian Democrats, dubbed the regulation a “bureaucratic monster” two years ago. Its German environmental spokesperson, Peter Liese, said at the time he was “not in favour of abolishing it”, but that the law needed to be modified.
Signatories say people and businesses in rural areas are ready to invest and take on responsibility, but need conditions that enable performance and reward “entrepreneurial courage”. They call for reforms to arrive “as concrete relief and a new economic perspective” on the ground, and say questions of responsibility and funding “must no longer lead to standstill”.
As it stands, the alliance wants Merz to put a cross-departmental package of immediate and fundamental reforms on his government’s agenda, with secured funding and clear responsibilities behind it. The signatories also ask him to call a federal-state summit soon, bringing in every affected ministry, and say they “stand ready to contribute their experience and concrete proposals”.
