Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether he plans to take steps with Cabinet colleagues to provide support to smallholder farmers in developing countries to meet the legal requirement to not contribute to deforestation under the Environment Act 2021.

The UK plays a leading role in supporting global efforts to protect and restore forest landscapes, driving international action to tackle deforestation and ensure forests are sustainably managed. This effort is underpinned by a commitment of £1.5 billion to international forests between 2021 and 2026.

The Government works with both businesses and smallholder farmers to improve sustainable practices and encourage forest-friendly business. The Investments in Forests and Sustainable Land Use programme (2015-2024) supports the development of new business models which provide jobs and livelihoods while protecting and restoring forests. The programme is implemented through a set of complementary interventions including Partnerships for Forests (P4F) (£120 million), which provides grant funding and technical assistance to catalyse investment into sustainable agriculture and forest management. To date, P4F has mobilised £1.25 billion in private investment into forests, brought 4.5 million hectares of land under sustainable management and directly benefitted over 250,000 people.

The UK’s Mobilising Finance for Forests programme is working to increase private investment in activities that create value from standing forests and/or incorporate forest protection and restoration into sustainable agricultural commodity production. This programme is complementary to P4F, targeting larger and more mature opportunities that will mobilise investment into sustainable land-use at scale.

The UK also supports companies in their transition to sustainable supply chains. The UK is a co-funder of the Tropical Forest Alliance, a public-private initiative hosted by the World Economic Forum which mobilises over 170 companies, governments and NGOs to tackle commodity-driven deforestation.

We also continue to work with consumer and producer country partners in forums such as the Forest, Agriculture, and Commodity and Trade (FACT) Dialogue, which the UK and Indonesia launched together as co-chairs in 2021. The FACT Dialogue convenes 28 major producers and consumers of internationally traded agricultural commodities to agree principles for collaboration and developed a Roadmap of actions which was launched at COP26, to protect forests and other ecosystems while promoting sustainable trade and development, in a way that respects all countries’ interests.