Lawmakers from European Parliament and Council of the European Union have reached a provisional agreement to simplify and postpone the EUDR, the EU’s landmark regulation aimed at rooting out deforestation from supply chains.

Under the agreement:

• Implementation of the law for businesses is deferred by one year compared to prior schedules.

• Compliance requirements will be eased: only the first operator placing a product on the EU market needs to submit the mandatory due-diligence statement, rather than all downstream operators.

• Micro and small operators face simplified obligations — for instance, filing a one-off declaration rather than recurring due-diligence submissions.

• Some lower-risk products — such as printed pictures, newspapers, and books — may be removed from the regulation’s scope due to their limited deforestation risk.

• The agreement also mandates a review by the European Commission by April 2026 to reassess the regulation’s administrative and practical burdens — and possibly propose further adjustments.

The change reflects growing concern among companies and some member states that the existing compliance framework — requiring detailed traceability back to farm-level land plots — is overly complex and may generate unrealistic compliance burdens, especially for smaller operators and businesses in global supply chains.

Still, critics warn that weakening or delaying the law could undermine the regulation’s fundamental purpose: preventing deforestation driven by global commodity supply chains. The coming months — including the formal adoption vote — will determine how the balance between ease-of-compliance and environmental integrity is struck.