The European Union has a new plan to curb deforestation. On paper, the goal is unimpeachable. In practice, the policy—known as the EU Deforestation Regulation, or EUDR—risks doing little for forests while making food more expensive far beyond Europe’s borders, including in the United States.

The EUDR is an archetype of Brussels lawmaking: lofty in aspiration, intricate in design, and already drawing resistance before the rules take effect. Multinational brands with deep ties to the U.S. market—Italian coffee maker Lavazza and Mondelez, the owner of Cadbury and Oreo—have urged regulators to rethink the approach and slow the timetable. The measure is slated to come into force in December.

When compliance costs spike for companies that source globally and sell in Europe, those costs do not stop at the EU’s borders. The core requirement is sweeping: companies that want access to the EU market must “prove” that their supply chains are free of deforestation. Meeting that standard to the satisfaction of EU authorities is not straightforward.

The regulation demands end-to-end traceability, placing the onus on buyers to verify the behavior of far-flung suppliers. That means a firm like Mondelez must corral the farmers who grow its cocoa—often smallholders in countries such as Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana—into producing geolocation data, land-use documentation, and other attestations tailored to European bureaucracy. Lavazza faces similar hurdles with coffee growers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Because European countries are among these firms’ largest markets, noncompliance is not an option.

None of this is free. The paperwork, audits, and data collection will be costly. Analysts estimate that the compliance burden for Europeans alone will run into the billions—money that eventually shows up in the price of everyday goods.

The problem is not only the bill; it’s the design. The EUDR’s theory is that if Europe buys only “clean” commodities—cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy, wood—then producers will stop clearing forests. But by building a rigid regime around traceability paperwork, the EU has created a system hardest on the farmers least equipped to engage with it. Many smallholders rely on manual labor, have patchy Internet access, and lack the capacity to navigate a geodata portal. Even large buyers report that only a fraction of their upstream partners have the forms, maps, and coordinates in order. With the December deadline looming, that gap looks less like a to-do list and more like a cliff.

For a policy sold as a science-based fix, the EUDR’s treatment of risk is oddly political. Brussels assigns each exporting country a label—low, standard, or high—that dictates how intense the checks will be. Every EU member state is, by default, low-risk. That categorization keeps paperwork lighter for domestic producers, but it sits awkwardly with the bloc’s own controversies. Finland has wrestled with legal challenges and penalties related to forest practices. Sweden, home to some of Europe’s oldest woodlands, has seen logging accelerate in certain regions; in one area, close to one percent of remaining forest disappeared in a single year.

Outside the EU, the picture can be inverted. Malaysia, which exports palm oil used in everything from shampoo to cookies, is classified as “standard risk” despite a marked improvement in forest outcomes. Over the past decade, the country has sharply reduced forest loss and sits in the top tier globally for preserving primary forests—ancient ecosystems that matter most for biodiversity, water cycles, and carbon storage. Producers operating under Malaysia’s national certification program have paired market incentives with “no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation” commitments, and the industry points to high rates of certified sustainable exports to Europe. Malaysia has also kept a longstanding pledge to maintain at least half of its land under forest and tree cover—an environmental promise many Western governments would struggle to match.

Why, then, does Sweden enjoy a low-risk label while Malaysia does not? Part of the answer lies in the metric Brussels prefers. The EUDR leans on gross forest-cover statistics—total forest loss—that flatten vital distinctions. Not all forest is equal. Clearing old-growth or primary forest and replacing it with monoculture plantations is not a like-for-like swap; the latter stores less carbon, supports fewer species, and leaves soils and watersheds more vulnerable. A system that treats a logged, replanted hectare in Scandinavia as equivalent to a protected tract of primary rainforest in Southeast Asia invites skewed incentives.

The friction shows up on the ground. A cocoa cooperative in West Africa may be only halfway through digitizing land titles or mapping plots when a European buyer asks for GPS coordinates for each lot and legal attestations for every transfer dating back years. A coffee exporter in Southeast Asia may face delays because a handful of smallholders cannot upload polygon files that meet EU technical specifications. The EUDR’s framers seem to have assumed that compliance would be as simple as pressing “export” on a spreadsheet. In reality, it is a data-governance project that stretches from remote farms to customs desks at European ports.

None of this would be defensible if the law’s environmental payoff were large and certain. The trouble is that better, cheaper tools already exist—and have been working. Malaysia’s certification standard for palm oil, coupled with corporate NDPE (no deforestation, peat, exploitation) commitments, has shifted behavior without requiring every farmer to become an amateur cartographer. Independent monitoring platforms track forest loss and can flag suspicious activity. Targeted enforcement, procurement preferences, and mutual recognition of credible national schemes can lock in gains while minimizing collateral damage to small producers and consumers.

A more pragmatic EU policy would start there. Instead of imposing a parallel bureaucracy, Brussels could recognize robust national certification programs—much as the UK has signaled with Malaysia’s standards—and focus on the laggards and leaky borders where illegal commodities slip through. It could refine its metrics to privilege the protection of primary forests, not just paper over losses with replanted acreage. And it could stage implementation to match administrative capacity on the ground, bringing smallholders along rather than dropping a compliance regime on them from 4,000 miles away.

Europe is right to want to eliminate deforestation from the products it buys. But the EUDR, as written, is a costly way to miss the mark. It threatens to raise prices for shoppers in Paris and Philadelphia alike while offering only ambiguous benefits to the world’s most important forests. A smarter policy would harness what is already working, align incentives with outcomes, and keep a noble ambition from becoming an expensive exercise in box-ticking.