A one-year extension gives coffee farmers like Leticia Monzon more time to comply with EUDR regulations. Photo credit: Rainforest Alliance
A recent update relating to the controversial EUDR requirements highlights how perspectives and incentives clash when it comes to navigating climate change. Announced October 1, the update pushes back implementation deadlines by one year, while offering more guidance and a stronger cooperation framework.
The regulation, which affects seven commodities (Cattle, Cacao, Coffee, Oil Palm, Rubber, Soya, and Wood), has been controversial since day one and has caused widespread panic among developing countries that lack the capacity to easily provide the bona fides required to continue selling products to their European clients.
Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee and a prominent exporter of coffea arabica, is a good example of the obstacles faced in implementation. These challenges are outlined in a report by the Dutch Agricultural Authority, which is partnering with the Ethiopian government to support solutions.
“In Ethiopia, the EUDR will have a detrimental effect on the economy if its negative impact is not managed well. Around one third of the country's export earnings come from coffee. It is the main source of foreign exchange, and the European Union (EU) is the largest market with around 30% of Ethiopian exports going there. Most Ethiopian coffee is grown in forested areas, where trees create the ideal shade conditions for coffee to grow. This is much less damaging than the monoculture plantations that are seen in other countries. Nevertheless, cutting down primary forest to make way for coffee trees does occur in some areas in the country. The EUDR can lead to coffee producers avoiding expansion into forested areas.”
“The main challenge for the Ethiopian coffee sector is that its coffee is mainly grown by around 5 million smallholder farmers. Most of them are low-income and lack the expertise or resources needed to collect complex data for proving their EUDR compliance. In addition, coffee supply chains are complex and fragmented, often involving several brokers. One single shipment of coffee can include beans from thousands of farmers.”
The extension has proponents of the regulation concerned: Global Watch reported that delay by one year could be responsible for deforestation of an area fourteen times the size of Paris and suggests that corporate interests are obscuring the clarity of the democratic system which created the groundbreaking regulation.
Meanwhile, on the ground, coffee producers continue to react in alarm as the news spreads. While advocates of the regulation feel that any delay will irrevocably harm the planet, the unintended secondary effects of the law on trade and agriculture around the world are decidedly mixed. In preparation, many buyers are already shifting away from complex ecosystems like Ethiopia and toward those in which the required mapping has already taken place—like Brazil, which with its monoculture, was a primary target for the mapping, but which has a much easier job of compliance—and there will certainly be long-term negative effects for those most vulnerable in the supply chain.