The EU has removed leather from its deforestation law, exempting hides from traceability rules that still cover beef, despite the Commission’s own research valuing the environmental benefit of inclusion at up to €1.96 billion a year against €16.7 million in compliance costs.
Leather handbags, shoes, and jackets can enter the European market without documentation showing the hide came from land that was not recently deforested. Beef from the same animal still requires it.
The European Commission adopted a delegated act on July 13 removing cattle hides, skins, and leather from the scope of the EU Deforestation Regulation, the law obliging companies to prove their goods were not produced on cleared forest. Retreaded tires came out alongside leather, while soluble coffee and several palm oil derivatives went in.
The European Parliament and the Council have two months to object. If neither does, the exemption takes effect automatically.
What the EU’s own research says about leather and deforestation
The Commission’s Staff Working Document put leather’s footprint at up to 390 square kilometers of deforestation a year, roughly 17 percent of the total risk across every commodity the regulation covers. It valued the environmental benefit of keeping leather in the law at 979 million to €1.96 billion annually. It put the cost of compliance at about €16.7 million. The Commission excluded leather anyway, citing the material’s “lower economic value,” a supply chain too fragmented to trace, and a balance of what it called “quantitative and qualitative considerations.”
“The Commission’s own analysis shows that leather has one of the highest deforestation footprints among all commodities consumed by Europeans,” Nicole Polsterer, a campaigner at the forest policy nonprofit Fern, said in a statement. “Yet the EU has yielded to industry pressure and excluded it from the EUDR. This will significantly diminish the law’s global impact in advancing traceable and deforestation-free cattle supply chains. Those calling most loudly for leather’s removal also appear to have the greatest vested interest in the continued flow of hides from deforested land into the EU market.”
Peer-reviewed research points in the same direction. Cattle raised for meat and leather drove 42 percent of global commodity-driven forest clearance between 2001 and 2022, according to a recent study published in the journal Nature Food. A 2024 paper in Ecological Economics attributed as much as 31,000 hectares of annual forest loss to EU leather imports alone. The Commission has drawn on both authors’ work elsewhere in its own EUDR assessments.
The case for exclusion rests heavily on a single 2024 report from Italy’s Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, published directly by the leather trade associations rather than in a peer-reviewed journal. “It’s quite reminiscent of the way the fossil fuel industry has historically tried to sabotage the development of renewable energy — commissioning poor‑quality studies to back talking points and undermine laws that would clean up supply chains,” Luciana Téllez Chávez, a senior researcher and campaigner at Human Rights Watch, told Mongabay.
The tannery boss who lobbied leather out of the EU deforestation law
Fabrizio Nuti runs Nuti Ivo, the Tuscan tannery group LVMH acquired in 2023. He also presides over UNIC, the Italian tanneries union, and serves as vice president of COTANCE, the pan-European leather association. Nuti and the two bodies he leads have met EU officials 16 times since 2024, roughly once every other month, according to Global Witness. He also owns a Paraguayan tannery the group says is at high risk of buying hides from farms responsible for 111,000 hectares of clearance in the Gran Chaco.
LVMH says it “has never undertaken any action to lobby EU institutions to reduce the scope of the EUDR,” and that its dealings with public authorities are disclosed in EU transparency registers. COTANCE has denied that the group sources from Paraguay. But the geography shows pressure. Most cattle-driven deforestation happens in Brazil, and Italy is the second-largest buyer of Brazilian hides by volume and by far the largest importer among member states, Polsterer noted, which is why the majority of leather industry submissions to the public consultation arrived from those two countries.
“We’re angry,” Charlotte Izard, a parliamentary assistant to French Green MEP Marie Toussaint, told Mongabay. “The commission should explain this. We must ask why it decided to withdraw this co-product [from the list of commodities], and what political pressure they have received to do so.”
Fast fashion faces penalties while luxury leather gets a pass
The exemption arrived inside a week of European regulation moving hard in the opposite direction. France steeply raised its penalties on ultra-fast fashion this week with per-item charges running from 25 cents to €12 and taking effect September 1. On July 19, the EU’s ban on destroying unsold apparel and footwear takes effect for large companies.
Enforcement now lands heaviest on cheap volume and lightest on expensive provenance. Europe will levy a retailer for a five-euro T-shirt and forbid it from incinerating what it cannot sell, and it will not ask a maison where the hide in a handbag was raised.
At its Capital Markets Day in Florence on April 16, Kering’s chief executive Luca de Meo said the group would cut its leather use 30 percent by 2028 under a plan called ReconKering, with next-generation materials potentially reaching 40 percent of its material mix by 2035, LaConceria reported. Leather accounts for roughly half of Kering’s raw material use. LVMH, Tapestry, and Prada Group have declined to comment on the exclusion.
The objection window is open, and campaigners are working it. The Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil wrote to the Commission on July 3 opposing the change. Fern and Mighty Earth followed with a joint letter. Dutch MEP Catarina Vieira has started a public campaign pressing the Commission to reverse itself.
“All the scientific evidence leads to the fact that leather has an impact on deforestation,” Vieira told Mongabay. “At the beginning, leather was included in the regulation because of this, so it would be incoherent to remove it.”
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