Dear UK Government,
We are the people who grow the cocoa in your chocolate and the coffee in your morning cup. We may live thousands of miles away from Britain, but every day our lives are connected to yours through the food you import.
We know how important our forests are. We want to protect them too.
Forests give us shade, protect our crops, and help our farms survive. They are home to wildlife and to our communities. They are part of the future we want for our children. That is why we welcome the UK’s new rules to stop products linked to deforestation from entering the UK regulations.
But we are worried about what happens next.
These new rules will mean that farmers like us must provide more information, collect more evidence, often multiple times for different businesses, and take on new costs simply to keep selling our crops to the UK.
For a small farmer, this is not a small thing, and we are worried that we will be asked to carry the biggest financial burden in these changes.
We are already facing rising costs, unpredictable weather, and harvests threatened by a changing climate we did not create. Many of us have very little money to spare. We cannot afford to pay alone for a problem that stretches all the way from our farms to some of the UK’s biggest businesses. The companies buying our crops need to play their part.
Protecting our forests must be done in partnership with support from UK businesses to protect our livlihoods thruogh practical support and shared costs.
Today, we are asking you to make the rules work for us as well as forests, to give us a voice in the decisions that affect our futures, treat us as equal partners and to ensure that the UK businesses we work with support us, with training, tools, and through shared responsibility for meeting this new law.
When you sit down with a cup of coffee or break off a piece of chocolate, remember that it began with a farmer like us. We want to keep growing it, we want to protect our forests, and we want our children to be able to farm too.
Work with us. Listen to us. Support us. Make sure the UK's new deforestation rules are fair for farmers as well as forests.
Signed,
105 Fairtrade Coffee and Cocoa Producer Organisations.
To see a full list of signatories, please copy and paste this link into your browser: https://bit.ly/4Afe5yd
