Supermarkets are urging the UK Government to ban illegal deforestation in food supply chains or risk creating trade barriers with the EU.
In an open letter to ministers, members of the Retail Soy Group including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Aldi said ending global deforestation is critical if we’re to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss and ensure future food security.
The Environment Act 2021 gave ministers the power to make it mandatory for large companies to carry out due diligence checks to ensure there is no illegal deforestation in their supply chains for forest-risk commodities such as soy, beef and palm oil. Yet four years on, successive governments have failed to enact the secondary legislation needed to put the deforestation provisions into effect.
The retailers said this delay had left UK businesses “in limbo”.
Currently, British companies have no legal duty to check whether commodities and products they import have been produced on illegally deforested land. This means that products on UK supermarket shelves, and served in foodservice settings, may be linked to illegal deforestation in places such as the Amazon, West Africa and Indonesia.
Recent research from the NGO, Global Witness, has shown UK imports of commodities like soy, beef, cocoa and palm oil contributed to the destruction of an area of forest overseas comparable in size to Newcastle in the past year alone.
The retailers said voluntary actions, such as the UK Soy Manifesto, have demonstrated that a market shift even amongst the most committed UK businesses is impossible to achieve without a binding regulatory baseline in place. “Deforestation is a clear example of a market failure that we are unable to address exclusively through voluntary commitments,” they stated.
The EU has already enacted its own deforestation regulation (EUDR) which is due to come into force on December 30th 2025. UK businesses could suffer more than £5.3bn in export losses to the EU if government inaction leaves them unprepared for the regulation, the retailers warned.
The group, which also includes Co-op, Lidl, M&S, Morrisons, Ocado and Waitrose, is calling for the government to adopt secondary legislation to implement the Environment Act, aligned as far as possible with the EUDR to support frictionless trade.
Ministers should also recognise European due diligence statements as being credible evidence of due diligence without requiring further documentation or action, and ensure supply chain transparency is required within British supply chains after the point of import so that companies have the information necessary to export products to Europe.
“Ending global deforestation and conversion of natural ecosystems is essential to stopping climate change, halting biodiversity loss, and ensuring the long-term security and sustainability of the UK’s food and soft commodity supply as well as providing the biggest gains in climate mitigation,” said Nicola Brennan, conversion-free supply chain specialist at WWF-UK, which helped convene the Retail Soy Group. “Forests are home to 80% of the Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity – there is simply no way we can fight the climate crisis and species extinction if we don’t stop deforestation.”
