Weber, who is a senior member of von der Leyen’s party and helped her campaign for a second term leading the EU executive in the spring, has fought against several key laws proposed by the Commission president to protect nature.
Most notably last year he led an unsuccessful rebellion against a law to restore damaged wildlands across the bloc. The EU election in June saw green-friendly groups lose ground, raising the prospect that the EPP would push back harder against their agenda.
“Together with our farmers, we are protecting the environment & avoiding a bureaucratic monster,” Weber said of the deforestation law.
The delays to the law had been foreshadowed for months as industry, farming groups, EU governments and the bloc’s trading partners baulked at the complexity of tracing and excluding products sourced from damaged forests.
Governments, particularly in developing countries, had complained the EU was imposing its values and laws on their domestic industry — especially as the deforestation law came in tandem with a carbon border tariff that the EU plans to place on heavy industrial imports like cement, iron and steel.
Uganda’s Agriculture Minister Frank Tumwebaze called it a “welcome step.”