Meine van Noordwijk , Sonya Dewi, Peter Akon Minang, Rhett Harrison, Beria Akon Leimona, Paul Burgers, Maja Slingerland, Marieke Sassen, Cathy Watson, Hoan Trong Do, Jeffrey Sayer

1. New policies for deforestation-free trade policies, such as the European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), critically depend on the definition of forest, as mappable land cover and/or as rights-related land use type. Areas with a high tree cover combined with agricultural use and agroforestry are excluded from the official forest definition but are not separately mapped. Based on the definitional confusion and publicly available maps traders (and EUDR control agents?) erroneously perceive high risks of deforestation for EUDR-compliant forest-margin farmers practicing agroforestry. Laudable objectives and perceived rights to act do not prevent collateral damage to ‘bystanders’ in a contested space.
2. Designed to reduce the shared responsibility for demand-driven deforestation associated with seven ‘forest-risk’ commodities, the regulation requires a detailed account of production locations, to be checked against existing spatial information on deforestation. However, the ‘non-mandatory’ EU-forest map for the 2020 reference date claims, for example, 25% more forest than what the government of Indonesia reports internationally. In Indonesia the risk of misrepresentation as forest on the ‘indicative’ EU forest map was 31% for tree crop monocultures (other than oil palm) and 63% for agroforests (rubber, cacao or coffee). The EUDR maps are not fit for the purpose for which they were designed.
3. In our analysis expected collateral damage is due to: Oversight (of social impacts on smallholders), Overconfidence (ignoring the considerable gap between the forest definition and available tree cover data), Overkill (the high precision of required production data is not aligned with capacities for valid interpretation) and Overreach (through a forest definition that has exclusion of agricultural use as key element).
4. Options respecting the common-but-differentiated responsibility of local and national governments (Far together instead of fast alone) have been discarded. A focus on old-growth forest (primary or naturally regenerated forest of high conservation value) could leave regulation of other tree cover to more local institutions. EUDR design flaws can still be corrected if collateral damage is recognized and taken seriously by the EU authorities.