The prolonged talks between Malaysia and Indonesia and the European Union to permit the two nations' palm oil exports to enter the bloc hassle-free are moving in a slow-expressive tango.
From Malaysia's perspective, the talks are "not stalling", despite what the Financial Times reported. This much Deputy Prime Minister and Plantations and Commodities Minister Datuk Seri Fadillah Yusof has avowed.
From the EU's context, it adopted a new law compelling imports and exports to be "deforestation-free" while upholding human rights. The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), approved by the European Parliament on April 19, compels exporting countries to guarantee that commodities (wood, palm oil, soy, coffee, cocoa, rubber and cattle) vital to national revenue are not produced on land deforested after Dec 31, 2020.
All in, the EUDR codified legal requirements for European businesses to stop biodiversity loss and human rights abuses embedded in international supply chains. However, the EUDR's implication is problematic, interpreted by Fadillah as unfair, where he urged the EU to treat Malaysia and Indonesia as partners who view the new law as "restrictive and too conditional".
Thus, the slow-expressive tango: talks of a free-trade agreement between Malaysia and the EU launched in 2010 "slow moved" in seven rounds of talks until 2012. The EU is Malaysia's fifth largest trading partner and imported from Malaysia €24.7 billion in goods in 2020 while EU exports reached €10.5 billion in 2021. A quick, historic perspective is needed on the EUDR's implications.
Firstly, EU members are mostly wealthy and prosperous, but that affluence stemmed from decades, if not centuries, of deforestation, pillaging, looting and imperialism, not just within the EU ranks, but also of vassal states, colonies and protectorates globally.
It is convenient for the EU to evoke a "woke" mentality, that the bloc is constructed upon textures of epochs of human development and rights and recent biodiversity when these layers were founded on bloodshed, greed and acquisitiveness over their wars, conquests, dictatorships and human rubble.
This blood-soaked superiority complex is the facade the EU masks itself with in insisting exporters to be just as "woke" as it is, never mind that most Asian nations need commodities' revenue just to survive while attempting nation-building according to the EU ideal.
On the flip side, Asian nations pushing hard for free trade into the EU, especially Malaysia, must at least consider to reasonably meet some of the EUDR's decrees. It doesn't help if our enforcement is lax on timber extraction, some illegal, while wholesale land-stripping for housing, agriculture and industries, documented starkly during landslides and indiscriminate floods in recent years, are routinely depressing.
Resumption of talks between Malaysia and the EU must be honest and earnest, with both sides willing to give and take. The EU can help by taking a few notches down on its scale of superiority complex while Malaysia must prove it will clamp down hard on deforestation and widespread and illegal logging activities.