With end-of-year shipping deadlines bearing down on them, beef exporters have all but given up hope of an exemption from new European deforestation rules.
From December 30 the European Union Deforestation Regulation will require all beef exports to the European Union, from anywhere in the world, to prove they are not a product of land cleared of trees in the previous four years or risk heavy fines.
Trade Minister Todd McClay last month told Farmers Weekly the rules were an unjustified barrier to trade and risked undermining the limited gains for beef exporters from the EU-NZ free trade agreement just months after it entered into force.
“They have a one-size-fits-all which does not work for NZ and is unnecessary,” McClay said.
“We have provided them information about our laws and asked for an exemption.”
Because large-scale clearing of native forests is illegal in NZ, the government has argued that the country represents a low risk to global deforestation.
But exporters spoken to by Farmers Weekly are not confident those arguments have been heard by the EU.
They are working towards NZ being held to the January 1 implementation date along with everyone else.
And because shipping deadlines for exports to enter the EU on that date fall in the middle of October, time is running short to get the required documentation in order.
“It is going to be tight,” said ANZCO’s general manager of sales and marketing, Rick Walker.
Walker said a system for matching satellite images of farms and National Animal Identification and Trading (NAIT) records of individual animals grazing them had been pulled together by the industry in recent months.
“It is not just ‘We picked up a cattle beast off this farm and we processed it and that farm was not deforested’.
“In theory we are meant to be able to show that animal moved across three different farms over the whole of its life and all three of those farms since 2020 were not impacted by deforestation.
“That has been part of the challenge of how do we do this.
“Is NAIT good enough? We are relying on NAIT to enable us to implement the solutions and inevitably there will be some blips.”
And with deadline fast approaching, exporters are still operating with incomplete information from the EU about what is required from them and their in-market agents.
For example, it is still not clear how often the EU requires each country’s deforestation information be updated, Walker said.
“Do we need to do it once a year and say we did this in January and we are working on this being our baseline for the rest of the year, or do we need to do it quarterly?
“If you took it to the nth degree, do we need to do it every week because we don’t know what happened last week and we killed animals this week?
“That is the information we are still trying to shake out through [the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Ministry for Primary Industries] to really understand what the EU’s expectations are of us as an exporting nation.”
A spokesperson for the Meat Industry Association said there had been no update to guidelines issued by the European Commission in December 2023 despite assurances there would be by now.
Even so, it is not anticipating a delay and is working with exporters to meet the requirements of the regulation as they are currently set out by the end of the year.
Walker said it is frustrating that NZ exporters will carry the cost of complying with the regulations when the country is planting more trees on farmland than it is cutting down.
It is clear that NZ is not the intended target but it is caught by the regulation nonetheless.
“On that basis the EU should be providing a derogation from the regulation and review it every three years to determine whether NZ is actually contributing significantly to deforestation around the world.
“We tick that box and we carry on. That would be the perfect solution but it is not going to happen.”
