Mike Redwood
Columnist
International Leather Maker
The European Commission’s decision on May 4, 2026, to propose the removal of leather from the EUDR scope (the “Simplification Package”) serves as a case study in why technocracy eventually hits a wall.
The one absolute clear takeaway from this two-year battle is the effort that the Cotance administrators, supported by their country associations, especially UNIC, put in to make it happen. For a long time, it looked certain that a stubborn legislative body would force the new law through unchanged and some of the public comments from NGOs and others in the ongoing short consultation period shows the pressure (and rather irrational arguments) coming from the other side.
What the EU and others must recognise is that we have a shared goal. Traceability, chemical management and deforestation-free supply chains are not just “red tape”, they are essential responses to a genuine environmental crisis. Tanners join with a wider society that no longer accepts “externalised costs” such as pollution and habitat loss. Tanners see themselves as a natural partner in sustainability, given leather’s role in upcycling a byproduct that is increasingly becoming a waste product.
Technocracy turns moral questions into administrative ones
Where problems arise is that technocracy too often tries to turn a moral and social question, “how should we live with our environment?”, into a purely data-driven, administrative one. Too often, technocratic rules accidentally punish those they claim to protect. The “blind spot” lies in what the regulations cannot see when it relies on “quantifiable metrics” which often ignore “qualitative realities”. Regulation likes satellite imagery and certificates. It misses the small-scale farmer in the Global South whose “traceability” is a handshake, not a QR code. If the cost of proving compliance is too high, the most sustainable (small, local, low-tech) players are pushed out of the market by the most “efficient”, the large, high-emission, high-capital players.
But “exclusion via compliance” is only one aspect of the issue since inherent in this technocracy is the belief that a complex, centuries-old social ecosystem can be managed from a spreadsheet. The unintended “social” damage caused by purely “moral” environmental goals can be severe.
Within this lies a blindness to livelihoods and skills. Tanneries are not all the same whereas legislation assumes every tannery should function like a high-tech factory, ignoring the social reality of communal or family-run operations that sustain entire communities. The difficulty of defining certain types of industry in chemical PPM, millimetre measures or blockchain structures is that this drives outputs towards generic industrial commodities, the very antithesis of the values of natural materials such as leather. Even more so if aspects like biophilia are considered.
In doing so, the work of the artisan becomes devalued and the “tacit knowledge” along with localised skills required to make and design the highest quality, durable goods. Tacit knowledge is often an essential element in innovation.
The EU must not ignore the social values of community business
A thoughtful EU might be expected to understand this better than most, being built of nearly thirty countries with quite distinct histories; cultural differences that need to be recognised and celebrated – beyond geographical indicator rules for food. We should not be overlooking the social reality of communal or family-run operations that have sustained entire villages and towns for centuries.
The great danger of this “metric mentality”, seen elsewhere as a push for modernity and new industries, is that metrics start to replace human judgment. We have lost too many skilled and experienced leather buyers to the process of restricting purchases to tanneries with a “gold” audit. While third party assessment plays an essential role, it should never be the whole story; especially in an increasingly corrupt world, true experts should be respected. We should not accept metrics entirely replacing the eye and hand, nor the social and moral value of work. While leather must continue to improve, aided by new tools, we must fight to retain all the human skills.
Treating craft as a living economic function
For towns from Alcanena and Arzignano to Himeji and Walsall, reducing leather production to little more than a carbon score means we ignore its role in cultural heritage and social stability. As Japan industrialised, many communities treated craft as a living economic function, not a relic, and used them to provide income, employment and community identity during the transition. This approach maintained a continuity of skill along with developing adaptability whilst retaining the dignity of making.
In Europe, some governments separated the old from the new yet as we see in Tuscany, they could layer the new onto the old in economic terms: developing and evolving. In Britain, as with our railways in the 1960s, governments set a pattern to prune and to optimise without thought for forward thinking or what might be lost. As a railway enthusiast, I am always reminded that the first Japanese Shinkansen started just as Britain drastically cut its railway network.
If these traditional skills can be structured as part of a future economy, not just preserved alongside it, we will maintain stronger local economies, more resilient supply chains and deeper material understanding, making the handling of waste products and development of adjacent hybrid materials more likely.
So, while the regulator might think that every part of the animal must carry a “carbon debt”, the social realist recognises the hide is a resource being saved from a landfill. By taxing or restricting the hide, you do not save a single tree; you simply make the leatherworker poorer and the waste-pile larger.
One could go on but overall, this reminds us that technocracy does have limits which are usually reached when the “cost of proving virtue” exceeds the “value of the work itself”. In this case, the law delved to non-logical levels, given leathers recognised non determining origins and then systematically created a regulatory approach that would have killed or severely damaged tanning and leather dependent communities in emerging areas. It would have also severely impacted some EU leather communities at the very moment when their governments should instead be searching for ways to support them through turbulent economic times.
So, to our excellent representative bodies who united to win this battle to keep leather out of the EUDR legislation, we must also spend time in the future considering how a natural material like leather, whose value is not easily captured in numerical measures, can be supported in the future, along with how to secure the futures of the communities within which it is embedded. That is the war where we must properly engage.
mike@internationalleathermaker.com
You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.
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