EUDR: What is it and what are its implications?

Sri Lankan rubber exporters to EU from pillar to post?

- By W.A. Wijewardena

Exporters of rubber-based products in Sri Lanka should prepare themselves to comply with EUDR if they are to penetrate the EU markets in their future strategies.

A recent public discourse hosted by Sri Lanka's private economic policy think tank, Verité Research, together with the EU delegation to Sri Lanka had warned the country's exporters that they should necessarily comply with the new EU Deforestation Regulation, abbreviated as EUDR, which will come to force by the end of 2025.1

The EU Ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldives Carmen Moreno had urged those in the audience to convert the challenge to an opportunity by adapting to the new regulations, remaining competitive, and sustaining growth in the years ahead. By any standard, this is a fine strategy in the form of a warning outlined by EU for Sri Lanka's exporters who are struggling to penetrate more to EU markets in a background of fatal tariff increase by US administration on Sri Lankan exports. Therefore, Monero further finetuned her advice by emphasising that shifting from compliance to competitiveness should be a choice made by the Government getting both the private sector and the public sector moving together for realising the goal.

Unfortunately, there was not any key politician from the Government side present in the audience except some top public officers. It is their responsibility to brief the top leaders in the Government appropriately if they hold a briefing line with them. The only politician present in the audience, as far as I understand, was the loner, the Leader of Opposition.

EU has been in the forefront of greening the world by introducing several measures to bring down the greenhouse gases and the biodiversity loss in the recent times. 2 In 2019, it had released a communication on stepping up EU action to protect and restore the world's forests. 3 It had alarmed the world of the rising deforestation and degradation of forests.