The EU apologies for the delay in replying to question AG-IMS ID 100071. It has been uploaded recently.
EU Reply to AGIMS 101033
Article 27 of the Commission proposal on deforestation indeed introduces the country benchmarking system, which is a key feature of this Regulation. The objective of the benchmarking is to incentivise countries to ensure stronger forests protection and governance, to facilitate trade and to better calibrate enforcement efforts by helping competent authorities to focus resources where they are most needed, and to reduce companies’ compliance costs.
The country benchmarking system will assign a risk level to countries or parts of countries taking into account a range of criteria. The assessment will be based on rate of deforestation, rate of expansion of agriculture land for relevant commodities and, production trends of relevant commodities and products, together with further criteria reflecting countries’ engagement in the fight against deforestation: their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the UNFCCC, national laws and enforcement of those laws, and the existence of relevant agreements with the EU and their effective implementation. These criteria will result in three categories of country risk: low, standard and high risk. All countries will be standard risk at the outset by default.
The Commission will make the country risk categorisation publicly available and update the list regularly. Countries will be informed of the intention to change classification and will be given the opportunity to comment. The Commission will also make publicly available the information used for benchmarking, the reasons for the proposed changes of classification and the replies from the countries concerned. The obligations for operators and member states authorities will depend on the level of risk of the country of production, with simplified due diligence duties for low risk and enhanced scrutiny for high risk.
The list of the countries or parts thereof that present a low or high risk shall be published by means of implementing act(s) to be adopted at a later stage. That list shall be updated as necessary in light of new evidence.
For more details about the proposals, please also see: Proposal for a regulation on deforestation-free products (europa.eu)