FEDIOL, the EU vegetable oil and protein meal industry association that represents the interests of the European oilseed crushers, vegetable oil refiners and bottlers, released its first monitoring of responsible soy up to the year 2020. The exercise is based on the voluntary reporting of FEDIOL’s member companies. It assesses the volumes of FEFAC Soy Sourcing Guidelines’ compliant soybeans bought and sold as meal or oil in the EU by FEDIOL’s member companies. The monitoring shows that 43% of the soy processed in 2020 was compliant with one of the schemes benchmarked according to FEFAC SSGs. This is a 79% increase as compared to the 2016 volume.  

The amount of FEFAC SSGs’ compliant soy products that FEDIOL companies were able to sell as verified or certified in 2020 reached 14%. While this is a 3% increase as compared to 2019, it still confirms the considerable 30% points’ gap between what FEDIOL companies bought and processed and what they actually sold as verified or certified, due to the limited customers’ uptake of soy meeting sustainability criteria. 

FEDIOL also assessed the geographical sourcing of soybeans from its member companies and the collection of their aggregated volumes of soybeans processed in the EU, with a view to reporting on the volumes of low and high deforestation-risk soybeans entering the EU market. 

The assessment concludes that 87% of the soybeans processed in the EU in 2020 were sourced from regions with a low risk of deforestation, representing a 20% increase as compared to 2016. Conversely, there are still 13% of soybean volumes sourced from high-risk regions where further efforts are being deployed to ensure soybean production is not linked to the destruction of forests or savannahs.

Check out the report here.