The fight over Europe’s promise to save forests

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system didn't work, so we have to postpone it for a year.

Yeah, so the commission said its IT system couldn't handle all that data.

And in September 25, it announced another delay of the law.

That's sort of where your investigation started.

What made you question that explanation?

So then I went to this online webinar organized by the Renew Group in the European Parliament.

The liberals.

The liberals.

What they did was quite simple.

They just asked a bunch of IT experts that have experience with these very big IT systems.

And they asked the experts...

So is that even necessary? Where does this postponement come from? And then these experts, basically, they were all in agreement saying like, look, there might be problems, but these problems have been flagged for quite some time now.

Commission didn't listen.

And then I got this pile of letters written by the big lobby organizations for the food industry in Europe.

and they flagged this issue with the IT system, with the commission already, until I could trace it back to December 2023.

And

this confirmed that the commission indeed could have known and should have known?

Yes, they should have known.

I mean, it's a little weird that they use this failure of the IT system while they should have known that for, at that point, about a year or two, and apparently they didn't do anything to fix it.

You also obtained an internal commission memo.

What did that memo say?

So what we have is basically in July of 2025, there's this sensitive internal memo written apparently by a senior official, which warns that the expected burden on the software system would lead to the complete collapse of that system.

Then one month later, there's a letter sent to one of the big associations representing the food industry.

They are told that the system is robust, so nothing's wrong.