(April 22): Some of the world’s top coffee traders and roasters are starting an initiative to map farms around the globe, in a bid to help tackle deforestation and keep the European market open for millions of growers.
Companies including JDE Peet’s NV, Louis Dreyfus Co, Sucafina SA and Neumann Kaffee Gruppe are working to create the map, according to a statement. The Coffee Canopy Partnership will use satellite data, artificial intelligence and on-the-ground verification to identify production. It will be publicly available, allowing farmers, governments and the coffee industry to access the data.
The initiative will help the sector comply with the European Union Deforestation Regulation that’s set to take effect on Dec 30. The EUDR — designed to tackle the felling of trees associated with the bloc’s imports of key commodities from soybeans and coffee to cocoa and palm oil — has faced two years of delays amid criticism over its excessive burden and the lack of readiness of companies.
The effort also reflects a broader shift among commodity traders toward collective approaches to sustainability, as fragmented company-led programmes struggle to address landscape-wide risks. Existing datasets often misclassify shade-grown coffee as forest, raising the risk that compliant growers could be excluded from EU markets.
“Mapping all the plots of coffee is a huge effort that the industry is starting but we’re still missing some,” Laurent Sagarra, vice president of engagement at JDE Peet’s, said in an interview. “There’s no way that a single company alone can do it and keep it up to date.”
The project will begin with a pilot spanning about 1.2 million sq km (463,000 sq miles) of coffee areas in East Africa, including in Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya. It plans to have global coverage of all coffee-growing regions in 2027 via expanded industry and institutional co-investment.
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The maps will be integrated into the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization's existing forest maps that are used by EU regulators, Sagarra said.
“The biggest challenge was to actually have one single source of truth when it comes to the forest map to use to check coffee,” Sagarra said. “That’s what we’re doing as part of the project.”
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