Europeans are about to get a lot less coffee from Africa, because the company imported it will now be liable for any environmental damage claims made by environmental NGOs about the farming practices in Africa.
That is the problem with Germany's new Supply Chain Act, warn critics. By making corporations liable for health and environmental damages caused along the entire supply chain, companies will be open to unlimited financial risk if they can't force their suppliers to use only pesticides that Germany likes. Or refuse to fill out more paperwork for foreign governments.
While the public cheer when they are told it will force companies to account for potential environmental hazards including pesticide emissions, there is as yet no attention being given to the supply decline that will occur if companies give up on the most affordable products and only deal with large multi-nationals that have incurred the costs and pass them along. Even environmentally sympathetic political blogs like Die Achse des Guten warn the new law is a political talking point for green activists but "problematic and not practical."
Yet on biotech Germany is more evidence-based
In more pro-science news, German Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner endorsed new breeding techniques as a means of meeting pesticide reduction goals and advocated for evaluation of risk on a case-by-case basis rather than basing it on the technology used. Activist groups have been pushing to increase bans of entire fields of science. Though mutagenesis, new strains created by radiation and chemicals, are considered organic because they began decades ago, newer techniques such as GMO, RNAi, and CRISPR-Cas9 have been targeted as worrisome. They continue to promote the belief that everything is a "GMO" except organic food.