EUDR for green-coffee importers: what you actually have to do

Regulation (EU) 2023/1115, the EU Deforestation Regulation, prohibits placing a set of commodities on the EU market unless they are deforestation-free, produced legally in the country of origin, and covered by a due-diligence statement. Coffee is one of the seven in-scope commodities.

The three conditions

For each batch of coffee, three things must hold before it can be placed on the EU market or exported:

• Deforestation-free (Art. 3(a)): the land was not subject to deforestation after 31 December 2020, the cutoff defined in Art. 2.
• Produced legally (Art. 3(b)): in accordance with the relevant legislation of the country of production, across the categories defined in Art. 2(40).
• Covered by a due-diligence statement (Art. 3(c)): a DDS is submitted before the product is placed on the market (Art. 4).

Due diligence has three steps

Article 8 defines due diligence as the combination of: collecting information (Art. 9), assessing risk (Art. 10), and mitigating risk where it is more than negligible (Art. 11). Only when residual risk is negligible can a DDS be filed and the goods placed on the market.

What the information step needs

Article 9 lists the information you must hold, including the description and quantity of the product, the country of production, and the geolocation of all plots where the commodity was produced. For coffee this means pinning every parcel that fed the lot.

Coffee is grown in different ways. In Brazil and Vietnam most of it grows in full sun, while in Ethiopia and parts of Latin America it grows under shade trees as agroforestry. In every case, a loss of tree cover over a coffee plot is not automatically deforestation, and screening that treats it that way will reject compliant farms.

Where Sylva fits

Sylva runs each batch as one case: it captures the Article 9 information, screens every plot for deforestation against the cutoff, works the Article 10 factors to a determination, opens Article 11 mitigation when needed, and assembles the due-diligence statement for the EU Information System.