The rules, which take effect at the beginning of next year, are meant to prevent businesses from importing goods, including coffee beans, if they have been grown on recently deforested land.
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Mr Lavazza claimed that even the initial step of digitally mapping the size of a farm using satellite coordinates would be impossible for many producers in the developing world.
He said: “Many farmers don’t know the boundaries of the farm, they have no chance of putting the geo satellite coordinates in the system.
“The farmer in Ethiopia doesn’t have any idea of, for example, the border of the farm. Many of them are just picking coffee, fantastic coffee, the best in the world, from wild forests.”
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A Commission spokesman pointed out that research published in the journal Nature had found that deforestation was itself a threat to wild coffee species.
He added: “EU regulation is pro-business. Deforestation is a threat to business – including to the coffee business.
“The Commission’s proposal for EUDR was prepared following a public consultation which received some 1.2 million contributions. In this context, an overwhelming majority of stakeholders (business associations and NGOs) supported a mandatory due-diligence regime.”
