Agroforestry & the draft regulations on Forest Reproductive Material and New Genomic Techniques

Policy Briefing #30-v3 updates our previous recommendations on the wording of the draft EU Forest Reproductive Material (FRM) Regulation. It discusses the agreed opinion of Parliament and Council before the start of Trialogue discussions this autumn with the Commission. Parliament´s amendments clarify that the FMR should apply agroforestry (as the previous Directive did in many countries). EURAF suggested this in our previous submission. Four types of certification of planting material are described in the FMR in increasing "quality" order: i) source identified, ii) selected, iii) qualified; iv) tested. This briefing stresses that the highest possible quality of planting material should be used for "in-field" agroforestry where there is less scope for self-thinning or improvement- thinning than in conventional forestry. However, we observe that there are existing quality labels for local tree seeds, such as Végétal local and similar initiatives in Europe, which are largely used in hedgerow plantations. As their primary objective is biodiversity and ecosystem services, they are not compatible with the 'source-identified' FRM category or, more broadly, with the FRM regulation. Rather, they are used alongside FRM, in a complementary way, in the context of hedge plantings. .