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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to help ensure the protection of the Amazon rainforest from increased illegal deforestation; and what plans he has to prevent UK businesses from using products sourced from illegally deforested land.

The UK has worked in partnership with Brazil for many years to combat deforestation. Through the UK’s International Climate Finance we have funded £259 million of programmes (2012 – 2020) to support sustainable agriculture, and increase the value of standing forests, and restore degraded lands, working with multiple stakeholders in the country. As part of this, the UK recently announced an extension of £16 million to the Partnerships for Forests programme, which supports environmentally-friendly farming and replanting projects in the Amazon, taking its total investment in protecting tropical forests in Latin America to £80 million this financial year.

We are also taking action at home. In 2019 the Government established the Global Resource Initiative taskforce to recommend actions to reduce the climate and environment impacts of key UK supply chains. Today we published our response to their recommendations by setting out a package of measures that we will take forward. One of the key measures announced is that the Government will proceed with a world-leading new ‘due diligence’ law to tackle illegal deforestation, and tabled an amendment to the Environment Bill yesterday. This new law will prohibit larger businesses from using forest risk commodities that were not produced in accordance with relevant local laws. These companies would need to undertake due diligence, and publish information about this exercise, to ensure this is the case. Businesses that do not comply with the new requirements would be subject to fines.