Save forests without leaving farmers behind

Farmers are on the front line of protecting forests and tackling climate change. Stand with producers calling for UK deforestation laws that work for people and planet. Forests and farmers are not competing priorities: effective regulation must protect both. 

Amani Adèle Yao, ECAKOOGECAKOOG, cote divoire

The UK Government is developing new rules to stop products linked to illegal deforestation entering the UK market.

This is an important step. Farmers depend on healthy forests and ecosystems, and many producer organisations strongly support action to tackle deforestation.

But the way these rules are implemented matters.

New requirements around traceability, mapping and data collection could place additional costs and administrative burdens on smallholder farmers and producer organisations. If businesses pass these responsibilities down the supply chain, producers could face new challenges despite being the people with the fewest resources.

Protecting forests and supporting farmers should go hand in hand. Responsibility for tackling deforestation must be shared fairly across the supply chain.

What we're asking for

Farmers and producer organisations are calling on the UK Government to ensure new deforestation regulations work for both people and planet.
How the UK can make forest protection fair:

Shared responsibility for compliance, traceability and geolocation costs across supply chains.
Financial, technical and training support for farmers and producer organisations.
Introduce a strong Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence (HREDD) law
Protection for farmers' livelihoods and market access.
A producer-centred approach that recognises growers as partners in delivering solutions.

We are training our farmers

on coffee varieties that are more favourable to the climatic changes. Back when coffee farming started people were depending on the old varieties, we ensure these seedlings are available free of charge for our farmers

Martin Kinyua, Assistant Manager at Mutira, Kenya

A letter from the people who grow your food

The letter, signed by producer organisations across Africa, welcomes action to tackle deforestation while calling for regulations that do not unfairly transfer costs and responsibilities onto farmers

Read the letter

Dear UK Government,

We are the people who grow the cocoa in your chocolate and the coffee in your morning cup. We may live thousands of miles away from Britain, but every day our lives are connected to yours through the food you import. We know how important our forests are. We want to protect them too.

Forests give us shade, protect our crops, and help our farms survive. They are home to wildlife and to our communities. They are part of the future we want for our children.

That is why we welcome the UK’s new rules to stop products linked to deforestation from entering the UK. But we are worried about what happens next.

These new rules will mean that farmers like us must provide more information, collect more evidence, often multiple times for different businesses, and take on new costs simply to keep selling our crops to the UK. For a small farmer, this is not a small thing, and we are worried that we will be asked to carry the biggest financial burden in these changes.

We are already facing rising costs, unpredictable weather, and harvests threatened by a changing climate we did not create. Many of us have very little money to spare.

We cannot afford to pay alone for a problem that stretches all the way from our farms to some of the UK’s biggest businesses.

The companies buying our crops need to play their part. Protecting our forests must be done in partnership with support from UK businesses to protect our livelihoods through practical support and shared costs. Today, we are asking you to make the rules work for us as well as forests, to give us a voice in the decisions that affect our futures, treat us as equal partners and ensure that the UK businesses we work with support us, with training, tools and through shared responsibility for meeting this new law.

When you sit down with a cup of coffee or break off a piece of chocolate, remember that it began with a farmer like us. We want to keep growing it, we want to protect our forests, and we want our children to be able to farm too. Work with us. Listen to us. Support us. Make sure the UK's new deforestation rules are fair for farmers and forests.

Signed by,
105 Fairtrade Coffee and Cocoa Producer Organisations

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The people who grow our food should have a voice in the decisions that affect their livelihoods.
Join producers, Fairtrade supporters and organisations calling for UK regulations that protect forests without unfairly burdening farmers.

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