Same, Same? Supply Chain Due Diligence Under EU CSDDD And EUDR.

As instruments of the EU Green Deal, both the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) impose supply chain due diligence obligations on companies. Their notions of due diligence, however, differ fundamentally in their underlying logics. CSDDD establishes an outward-facing, process-oriented due diligence rooted in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: companies must identify adverse impacts on people and the environment, engage with affected suppliers, and treat disengagement as a last resort. EUDR establishes an inward-facing, binary compliance framework: operators must demonstrate traceability to the upstream end and negligible risk of non-compliance before placing forest-risk commodities on the EU market, with no obligation to engage with or remediate conditions at origin. Drawing on supply chain management perspectives and comparative analysis of the two instruments' legal texts, including the Omnibus amendments, this Article argues that the simultaneous operation of these divergent frameworks creates regulatory ambiguity for companies, and that EUDR's more immediate and binary enforcement architecture creates structural incentives toward supplier exclusion – with consequences that affect smallholder farmers and producers in high deforestation-risk regions and undermine CSDDD's engagement imperative, EUDR’s no-deforestation ambitions as well as the EU’s Green Deal and Just Transition ambitions.