About one month earlier than expected, the European Commission has released the EUDR country risk benchmarking.

The classification of high-risk countries according to EU or UN sanctions follows the information that was previously leaked by EU diplomats to Euractiv.

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Overview

• The benchmarking classifies countries according to the risk of deforestation regarding the production of EUDR commodities.
• The risk classification defines the extent of compliance checks that EU competent authorities will perform on operators when sourcing from these countries:
  
  • 1% for low-risk countries
  • 3% for standard-risk countries, and
  • 9% for high-risk countries
• Sourcing from low-risk countries enables simplified due diligence, meaning that operators and traders need to collect information, but not assess and mitigate risks.

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Country Risk Classification

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Only four countries are labeled high risk under the benchmarking and will be subject to more stringent checks:

• Belarus
• North Korea
• Myanmar
• Russia

50 countries, including Brazil, Côte d'Ivoire and Indonesia, are classified as standard risk.

A total of 140 countries are classified as low risk. This includes all EU Member States, the United States, Canada, China, Ghana, Thailand, and others.

Refer to the table below to see the risk categories of all countries.

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Methodology

The classification of countries as low or standard risk is based on the following indicators:

1. deforestation rate
2. rate of expansion of agricultural land for EUDR crops
3. production trends of relevant commodities

The benchmarking is based on the latest available forest cover and deforestation data from the FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment and data from FAOSTAT on cropland expansion and commodity production.

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Global Forest Resources Assessment

The deforestation rate is derived from the FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment for the year 2020. This dataset is based on reporting made by FAO Member States.

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FAOSTAT

The expansion of agricultural land and production trends are based on FAOSTAT data. Land use statistics of crops are used to indicate agricultural land expansion. For cattle and wood, production data is used since there are no direct land use statistics.

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High Risk

Countries subject to sanctions on imports or exports by the UN Security Council or the EU Council are classified as high risk, as it is impossible to conduct due diligence along the value chains in these countries.

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Low Risk

There are three pathways for a country to be classified as low risk:

1. There is no net forest loss between 2015 and 2020 (no deforestation).
2. The level of deforestation is below both the relative threshold (0,2% of annual forest loss between 2015 and 2020) and the absolute threshold (70.000 hectares of forest loss per year). In addition, countries with less than 1.000 hectares of deforestation per year are categorized as low risk. This accounts for small countries with a low absolute level of deforestation but high relative deforestation rates.
3. There is no expansion of agricultural land for EUDR crops, no increase in the level of production of timber and cattle, and no expansion of overall agricultural land. The goal is to identify countries with deforestation caused by other factors not covered by the EUDR (such as urbanization).

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Standard Risk

All further countries are classified as standard risk.

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The benchmarking process will be dynamic, with a first review scheduled for 2026.

More details on the country benchmarking can be found here.