Losing Forests by the Minute: New Laws in Cameroon and the EU’s Global Push
Tick-tock. With every minute that passes, roughly ten football (soccer) fields of irreplaceable tropical primary forest vanish from our planet. Deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics have serious local and global impacts, like undermining livelihoods of local communities and peoples, harming biodiversity, and aggravating climate change impacts. The relentless forest loss is particularly critical in regions like Africa’s Congo Basin, which is the second-largest continuous tropical rainforest in the world and a biodiversity hotspot. In hopes of addressing these issues, policy makers have taken different initiatives. Cameroon – a country in the Congo Basin – adopted a revised Forestry Law in 2024, replacing its previous Forestry Law that stemmed from 1994 and appeared long outdated. The revised law regulates and aims to achieve the sustainable use and management of Cameroon’s forest resources, responding to today’s challenges like the climate change. The European Union (EU) has also taken initiative with its Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (EUDR). The EUDR aims to minimize the EU’s contribution to deforestation and forest degradation worldwide and thereby reduces global forest loss. This rests on the notion that the EU market imports and consumes forest and agricultural products that fuel forest loss elsewhere. The EUDR focuses on seven such commodities, namely: cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy, and wood.
These two initiatives share similar end goals but vary in their approach and scope. Cameroon’s revised Forestry Law is focused on creating clear rules of play in the country’s forest sector, which covers participatory management of forest and wildlife resources, sustainable forest management, forest protection and conservation, and community rights, among other things. The law defines the State’s role of monitoring and enforcement and sets penalties in cases of non-compliance. For Cameroon, the EUDR means EU companies must verify that the seven key commodities imported from Cameroon are legal and haven’t caused deforestation or forest degradation since 2020. To this end, companies in the EU must seek collaboration with their overseas suppliers in ensuring that EUDR provisions are met. For goods to be exported to the EU, companies in Cameroon must document and make available information to their EU buyers about the legality and deforestation-free status of their products. These measures include aspects like providing geolocation information about where commodities were grown and harvested.
Different initiatives like the new Forestry Law and the EUDR can complement and support each other. Cameroon’s revised Forestry Law can help companies with EUDR compliance by seeking to strengthen the monitoring of forestry operations and punishing offenses more severely. The EUDR puts emphasis on legal compliance in countries of origin, like Cameroon, which can strengthen efforts to monitor and ensure compliance with forest and other laws in place. It can also help enhance traceability and transparency of supply chains, because it requires geolocation information of the commodities that are harvested and exported to the EU market – this, in turn, can support the goals of Cameroon’s new Forestry Law.
However, the initiatives also face challenges. For instance, the Forestry Law’s definitions of legal concepts may not align with international standards. Uncertainty also looms over the law’s implementation and enforcement, which has been a pain point with the previous edition of the law due to lacking resources and capacities of the forestry administration, for instance. This casts doubts over its potential effectiveness. The EUDR will also face multiple challenges in its implementation, like ensuring that its provisions are effectively enforced in the EU. The EUDR could also unequally affect producers in Cameroon, because smaller producers may struggle to meet the regulation’s strict requirements. It could also lead producers to divert their exports to other countries, such as China and Vietnam, where sustainability and legality standards are less strict than in the EU. Hence, while the EUDR’s effectiveness remains to be seen, it is already facing serious question marks.
Cameroon is not alone. Other countries in the region, like Gabon, are grappling with the EUDR’s implications while simultaneously devising their own domestic strategies to deal with deforestation. Ultimately, the story is repeated across countries worldwide, because the international trade by the EU means the EUDR has a global reach and each country will have its own interests, preferences, and proposed solutions to forest loss.
That is why it is crucial to seek collaboration among countries, underlining the shared responsibility in tackling deforestation. This is increasingly important in the context of today’s trade policy environment with its tangible tensions, where unilateral measures tend to carry unintended consequences. Hence, collaboration in implementation of regulations is especially essential for the EUDR, because its influence extends across the borders of a single country. Also, regulations like the revised Forestry Law remain the backbone in a domestic context, so their implementation and enforcement should be supported by partner countries. It is for the benefit of forests and communities that different regulations should ideally support each other: by creating a framework that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Authors: Mathias Cramm (European Forest Institute) and Abubakar Ali Shidiki (University of Dschang)
Feature image by MATTHEW / Adobe Stock.