UNIC asks for urgent steps to stop EUDR from harming the leather industry
National tanning industry organisation UNIC has called on the authorities in Italy and, more widely, in the European Union, to take urgent steps to mitigate the possible effects on the leather sector of the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
New rules that seek to guarantee that products from a list of seven commodities have no links to deforestation, will start to come into effect in the EU at the end of this year, as things stand.
Among the commodities affected are products from cattle, including hides and leather. Under EUDR requirements, operators must “exercise due diligence” to provide guarantees that the products have no link to deforestation.
This will involve collecting information and compiling supporting documents to show what the product is, the country it comes from and, beyond that, “the geolocation of all plots of land where the commodities that the product contains, were produced, as well as the date or time range of production”.
After they compile this detailed information, operators will then have to carry out to their own risk assessment “to establish whether there is a risk that the relevant products are non-compliant”. If there has been deforestation on any of the plots of land listed, all the commodities involved will be “automatically disqualified” from coming into the EU or being exported from it.
At the start of April, UNIC issued a statement calling these requirements “unnecessarily severe and stringent”. It said traceability tools that would be capable of capturing in the time available the information EUDR demands are unavailable. It added that the tools that are available would be inadequate for the task in hand.
It warned that the impact of EUDR on the leather industry’s ability to maintain current levels of employment and to ride a challenging economic environment will be devastating if there is no “urgent intervention” from the authorities.
UNIC said Italian leather and leather products manufacturers are fully committed to sustainability and to traceability, but are in no doubt that the demands EUDR makes of them and their colleagues across the EU are unfair.
