A key topic of discussion at the Carrefour Internationale du Bois (CIB) exhibition in Nantes, France at the end of May was the time and effort businesses are having to put into preparing for the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). There is now just six and half months before it comes into force. It will require that operators and large traders placing timber and other ‘forest and eco-system risk commodities’ (FERCS) on the EU market, or exporting them from it, undertake due diligence to ensure they are deforestation-free, legal, and accompanied by geolocation coordinates of the ‘plot of land’ where they originated.

The EUDR was the topic of a special seminar at the CIB, jointly hosted by the International Tropical Timber Technical Association (ATIBT) and the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC). The representatives of companies operating large concessions in Africa that spoke at this event were confident in their existing systems and strategies to meet the EUDR requirements.

Vincent Istace, CSR head of Olam Agri, parent of CIB in the Republic of Congo highlighted that deforestation across the Congo Basin is now less than 1% annually and that FSC-certified sustainable management further minimised the risk of forest loss.

“In our almost 2 million ha of certified forest we operate a cutting cycle of one tree per ha every 30 years. Our processes include social, habitat and wildlife protections and we have a major planting programme,” he said.

He said CIB was also confident its traceability systems would aid compliance. “Using id numbers for each tree, we can track timber from stump, through processing,” he said. It was also pointed out that each forest concession could be counted as a single ‘plot of land’ for EUDR geolocation purposes.

Emmanuel Bon, general director of Cameroon-based Alpicam also said his company was trusting in FSC sustainable forest management certification, which it achieved in 2023, and its tracking and forest inventory systems, to satisfy EU customers due diligence requirements. He said it recorded geolocalised data for cutting areas as a matter of course and uploaded the information into the Cameroon government operated SIGIF 2 ‘computerised forest information management system’. This, he maintained, allows tracking of timber ‘from the cut to the port of shipment’.