TEGUCIGALPA, Sept 18 (Askume) – The world’s top coffee body will urge the European Union to suspend requirements for coffee beans imported from areas linked to deforestation, the head of the world’s top coffee body said on Wednesday.
The rules, which take effect later this year, will ban the sale of coffee as well as cocoa, soybeans, palm oil, timber, rubber and cattle if companies cannot prove the products originated in those regions.
“We cannot reach that date, it’s impossible,” Vanusia Nogueira, director of the International Coffee Organization (ICO), said in an interview.
ICO is an intergovernmental organization affiliated with the United Nations and represents more than 90% of global coffee production and more than 60% of consumption. Top coffee producing countries such as Brazil, Vietnam and Colombia are its members.
“That’s a very ambitious deadline,” Nogueira said. “We believe that by working with (EU leaders) they might be more willing to move that date forward.”
He did not say how long the ICO expects to extend the deadline.
Asked about possible consequences if coffee producers fail to meet the deadline, Nogueira said the EU would “find a solution.”
“Europeans love coffee…they can’t live without it,” he said.
Noguera was speaking at the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) Coffee Summit in Tegucigalpa.
About three dozen CELAC member countries will issue a statement at the end of the summit urging the EU to delay the mandatory deforestation date, said Carlos Murillo, Honduras’ deputy minister of coffee production.
