Every year, an area larger than the size of Denmark is deforested in order to make way for more agriculture – not only accelerating climate change, but harming biodiversity across the world.
As the current president of the Amsterdam Declarations Partnership, the environment and food minister, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, has sent a letter urging the EU Commission to produce an action plan to tackle deforestation in the EU.
“We only have one planet and we need to take care of it as well as possible. Deforestation contributes to the destruction of natural biodiversity and local ecosystems, and it leads to more global warming,” said Ellemann-Jensen.
“So we must act as soon as possible to ensure that sustainable production and consumption replaces the exploitation of nature.”
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So-ya gotta act!
Other countries that have signed on to the Amsterdam Declarations Partnership, which was established in 2015 to focus on sustainable, deforestation-free value chains in agriculture, include the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, France, Italy and the UK.
Amsterdam Declarations Partnership focuses in particular on commodities such as palm oil, soya and cocoa. Denmark, for instance, imports significant amounts of soya to use as feed in the agriculture sector.
From 2005 to 2016, Denmark imported 1.4 to 1.9 million tonnes of soyabean meal/cake annually, as well as about 250,000 tonnes of palm oil annually from 2010-2017.
