US lobbyists held more than 350 EU meetings to dilute deforestation law

American companies and trade groups held at least 351 meetings with members of the European Parliament and senior Commission officials over two years in what the campaign group Mighty Earth calls a "relentless and aggressive campaign" to weaken the EU Deforestation Regulation, according to the Guardian.

The regulation prohibits imports of cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya and wood from deforested land. When it was put forward, the then environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius called it "the most ambitious legislative attempt to tackle these issues worldwide ever". Implementation has since been delayed twice, and the original goal of rigorously tracing the origin of commodities has been revised so heavily that some of the policy's initial supporters say it has in effect been dismantled. What remains comes into force in December.

Mighty Earth counted 24 major US companies, trade associations and industry organisations in at least 173 meetings with MEPs and 178 with senior Commission officials between July 2024 and July 2026. The most frequent visitors to the Commission were the National Alliance of Forest Owners, the Advanced Woody Biomass Alliance, the US Soybean Export Council, Bunge, the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU and Cargill; Mondelēz logged eight meetings, Cargill two and Bunge one. The effort also ran through the US Congress, the Department of Agriculture, the Office of the US Trade Representative and the White House.

US company representatives and industry groups deny a concerted campaign, saying their meetings raised legitimate concerns about implementation. Lobbyists from Brazil and several EU member states also pressed for dilution; Mighty Earth's report is the most detailed accounting yet of the American share, and the group argues the EU needs greater transparency about lobbying and better access for civil society to balance it.

In July 2025 Donald Trump met Commission president Ursula von der Leyen at a Scottish golf course. Two weeks later the two sides issued a joint statement in which the Commission undertook to address "the concerns of US producers and exporters regarding EUDR, with a view to avoiding undue impact on US-EU trade" — and recorded its view that the United States "poses negligible risk to global deforestation". Mighty Earth notes that many of the country's biggest financial and trading companies have been repeatedly implicated in the destruction of the Amazon and similar biomes.