Insights into the latest EUDR Review

EC greatly simplifies EUDR for EU producers but offers little for imports

There was a flurry of activity around EUDR at the end of April, the deadline by which the EC was required under the terms of the December 2025 EUDR Amendment legislation, to publish a report on additional “simplifications” to reduce costs of implementation. That report duly arrived only a little late, on 4 May, alongside an updated set of guidance and FAQs, and drafts of a Delegated Act on product scope and an Implementing Act on the IT system. As widely expected, this new package from the EC was a disappointment as far as meaningful measures that might simplify implementation outside the EU is concerned.

In the weeks before the report was released, the EC had flagged that their disinclination to open up the legal text to any further amendment, having already re-engineered it at the last year to effectively remove most due diligence requirements for commodity production and trade within the EU internal market and put the focus almost exclusively on commodity imports from outside the region.

The main conclusion of the EC report is that “the measures introduced in 2024 and 2025, together with the December 2025 amendments and new simplification measures accompanying this Report, lead to a substantial reduction in administrative burden and a considerable simplification for companies which fall under the scope of the Regulation. This reduction is particularly relevant for operators sourcing from low-risk countries, for micro and small primary operators, and for downstream actors, notably through the introduction of simplified procedures”.

Unfortunately, this statement appears, in one important respect, to include a deliberate misdirection. It is implied that operators sourcing from all “low-risk countries” will benefit from the latest round of simplifications. However, in practice the vast majority of benefits are directed towards operators sourcing commodities produced in the EU. It is, indeed, very thin fair for those sourcing products outside the EU.  

No consideration for proposed change in “plot of land” definition

AHEC’s submission to the EC asking that the “plot of definition” for which geolocation data be provided should be corrected to remove the reference to “within a single real estate”, is nowhere referenced in the EC report. This despite an incontrovertible case that the definition cannot be applied to the three quarters of world forest area that is not in “real estate” and that removal of the phrase would help level the playing field between commodities from non-industrial, industrial and state forest owners outside the EU.

The implicit rejection also came despite the measure being recommended by EU lawyers commissioned by AHEC and gaining support of the entire US forest products sector, North American tribal leaders, and CEI Bois, the representative organisation of the EU wood manufacturing sector, amongst others.

The EC’s failure to even consider the possibility of making this amendment is extremely disappointing, but perhaps not surprising. The idea of introducing a change that might be universally applied internally and outside the EU runs counter to the EC’s clear political imperative to reduce bureaucracy for domestic producers and industry.  

Due diligence and traceability obligations removed for EU production and trade

For EU’s internal producers and manufacturers, the changes are indeed far-reaching. In fact, the EC report and new guidelines make very clear that no “due diligence” will be required at all for regulated commodities harvested in the EU itself (which include wood and cattle). Forest owners and farmers are obliged only to prepare what amounts to a self-declaration that their own operations are legal and deforestation-free. For EU primary producers classed as “micro and small” with a turnover less than €50m (i.e. at least 99%), this self-declaration need be submitted only once to the EUDR IT system. If they are already listed on a national database or a member of a forest association, they need not issue it at all. They also do not need to provide plot level geolocation data, only their postal address.

Having fulfilled the very limited self-declaration obligations, EU producers are issued with a “Due Diligence System Reference Number” that they can use in all subsequent transactions with their immediate buyers, the so-called “first downstream operators”. This operator – typically the primary processing mill or log exporter – is obliged to collect reference numbers and enter them onto the IT system, but not to pass them on to their own customers. There is now effectively no meaningful traceability or due diligence obligation further downstream inside the EU – including for all manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and exporters of derivative products such as joinery, furniture, or paper.

EU origin products effectively laundered “legal and deforestation free”

The new guidance clarifies what is required for “re-imports” of products into the EU. Any regulated commodity exported from the EU – such as European oak logs to China or Vietnam - can be returned to the EU in finished products by the simple expedient of showing it is sourced from the EU. Based on self-declarations, zero due diligence, and zero internal traceability, all products showing “EU origin” in the world market are thereby laundered “legal and deforestation-free”.

In their report, the EC claims to have reduced compliance costs by 75%, but this figure does not consider upstream operators outside the EU that are not directly responsible for compliance (like submitting due diligence statements) but nonetheless obliged to provide their EU customers with far-reaching due diligence and geolocation information.

Changes to EUDR product scope & IT System

The draft delegated act on EUDR Annex I proposes updates to the list of products in scope but there are no significant changes in relation to forest products. Calls from some interests for wood residues such as sawdust, wood chips and similar processing residues falling under HS 4401 to be removed from the legal scope have gone unheeded. A public consultation on the draft act is open until 1 June 2026.

After serious problems were raised about the ability of the EUDR IT system to cope with the volume of expected traffic once enforcement begins, it is currently undergoing major overhaul. It is not now available to EU operators even for training purposes, a situation not expected to change before June. The draft implementing act on the IT system is now being presented to EU countries for approval. It includes the simplified declaration for micro- and small primary operators placing products directly on the EU market, updated specifications for automated applications, and other measures to improve user friendliness. All these measures apply only to operators with access to the IT system which, to all intents and purposes, is limited to EU persons and companies.  

Does the EC report offer any opportunities for AHA?

While there is little in the EC report and latest guidance to directly change the position of the AHA platform in relation to EUDR, there are some potential new opportunities.

• The new Guidance reiterates and reemphasises that the only purpose of “simplified due diligence” that operators must apply to their purchases from low risk countries is to ensure that the relevant commodity was actually produced in that low risk country and not mixed with material potentially from another country that is not low risk. The clear implication is that if provenance to a specific area – such as a county – in a low risk country can be proved, there can be no added value from providing plot level data and insisting on such is, by definition, disproportionate. It can surely only be a matter of time before EC and EU regulators have to acknowledge this.  
• The Guidance now makes clear that there is no need for operators sourcing from low risk countries to check on the legality of every single individual harvest operation and that they can rely on jurisdictional risk assessments (JRAs) like those produced by AHA. The Guidance now states that “for supply chains, production areas and countries of production where the initial examination of available information indicates a negligible risk of non-compliance with Article 3(b) [requiring proof of legal production], operators should not be required to carry out an in-depth data collection. For instance, they should not be required to systematically collect comprehensive legal documentation for each individual plot of land, to obtain specific types of documents such as individual land titles, or to compile an exhaustive list of all potentially relevant laws, legal documents or data”.
• The EC report mentions their intention to create repositories for legislation and certification schemes to facilitate implementation of EUDR article 9 on data provision by operators. This offers an opportunity to ensure the comprehensive data contained within the AHA JRAs, and the verification system itself, be listed in these repositories, thereby achieving formal acknowledgement of their role in demonstrating EUDR compliance.
• The EC promises to launch a call for new members to join the EUDR Multi-Stakeholder Platform, which advises on EUDR implementation. AHA will explore opportunities for more direct engagement in that Platform.

On-going political engagement

AHA is continuing a program of direct engagement with EU Member State Competent Authorities, and with EU trade and industry bodies at both EU and national level, to communicate AHA’s role in demonstrating conformance to the EUDR.

A meeting with officials at MITECO, Spain’s Ministry for the Environment, on 21 April went about as well as could be expected. A clear explicit assurance that the AHA county risk data and geolocations would be accepted for EUDR conformance purposes in Spain was probably too much to hope for. But MITECO now have a very clear idea of what AHEC is doing, and why. They understand that AHA is a far-reaching, innovative, and entirely legitimate attempt to fulfil the EUDR obligations in a supply chain that simply does not lend itself to the specific technical requirements for geolocation polygons.

We also took encouragement from MITECO’s acknowledgment, somewhat grudging, that the approach we are advocating - combining "area-based traceability" with "risk-assessed administrative units" to be legally facilitated by the simple removal of the reference to "single real-estate properties" in the "plot of land" definition - "maybe" a better approach than the individual plot model the EU is currently advocating.

By the end of the meeting, MITECO seemed very inclined to accept that AHA demonstrated that U.S. hardwoods are indeed negligible risk in line with EUDR. But they also very deliberately dampened down expectations of their being substantive changes either to the legal text or the guidance on plot level geolocation requirements between now and the end of the year.  

Therefore, for them the main outstanding question seemed to be how we might finesse the AHA county geolocation data so that it appears the plot level requirement is being fulfilled, without having to make fundamental changes either to the EUDR or AHA. Given the abundance of detailed, high resolution, and fully quantified, evidence we put before them to prove negligible risk, we had the sense that they are really just looking for a “get-out” clause so that they feel no obligation to block U.S. hardwood for purely technical non-conformities, thereby further damaging both trade relations and the reputation of EUDR.  

A meeting with officials at MASAF, Italy’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry, followed a similar trajectory. They listened attentively to all we had to say about the AHA system and how it guaranteed legal and deforestation-free status. No questions were raised about the quality of the assurances provided, or of the technical challenges involved, only a request that we continue to look for ways to at least give the appearance of fulfilling the plot level requirement.

Needless to say, it is frustrating to be faced with this continuing insistence by EU regulators on application of technical specifications, merely for the sake of appearances, even when provided with the clearest possible demonstration that they are entirely unnecessary to meet the legal origin and deforestation-free objectives, and contradict the EU’s own laws on proportionality and data protection, not to mention international trade obligations.

Nevertheless, AHA is determined to ensure that there can be no question of the Platform’s recognition for EUDR conformance purposes before enforcement begins at the end of this year. We are working on three strategies in parallel:

• Continued direct engagement with EU regulators to promote the overwhelming technical and legal case for AHA providing county level geolocation data instead of property level of geolocation data.
• Engagement with other U.S. forest industry associations to encourage concerted action at a political level to ensure the EU follow through on their commitment to "avoid undue impact on US-EU trade” resulting from EUDR, and their acknowledgement of U.S. negligible risk status contained in the EU-US Framework Trade Agreement.
• Continued exploration of possible technical fixes to facilitate EU regulators acceptance of AHA geolocation data as fully aligned with the existing EUDR legal text without requiring collection of additional data by AHA users or coming into conflict with private property, privacy, commercial confidentiality, or data protection issues necessarily associated with provision of property level data. While undoubtedly a serious challenge, we have identified a few possibilities worthy of additional exploration.