Devex Dish: African coffee farmers race to pass the EU tree test

If you’re a smallholder coffee farmer in East Africa right now, you’re probably thinking a lot about Dec. 31. That’s when the EU’s Deforestation Regulation finally kicks in — and whether your beans make it into Europe may come down to GPS points.

The rule is simple in principle: Products sold in the EU shouldn’t be linked to land that was deforested after 2020. The execution is anything but. To comply, global producers of coffee, cocoa, palm oil, beef, and rubber seeking to sell their products in the EU must prove exactly where crops were grown — down to the plot — and show the land wasn’t a forest in the last five years (doable via satellite imagery). That means millions of small farms now need to be mapped, documented, and digitally traceable — at speed.

Producers say the goal makes sense. Meeting the timeline — and the expense of mapping — is the hard part.

“I wish we had more time,” Samson Emong, CEO of Cafe Africa Uganda and a member of the country’s national task force for EU compliance, tells me. “We are almost there but we would welcome an extension of some sort; 6 months, 12 months. Our biggest challenge is resources — we have the structure in place, we know what to do. But raising finances … is a process.” Last week, the European Commission scrapped a plan to delay the law by a year after already postponing it for 12 months in 2024.

Even where governments promise to support mapping, that assurance isn’t always reaching the ground. Festus Bett, CEO of Kenya’s National Coffee Co-operative Union, tells me some of the 800,000 farmers he represents paid private firms to register their plots and even went into debt to do so to avoid losing their European market access.

Meanwhile, buyers have been paying attention to what will be easiest to certify. Industry groups say some traders have already shifted sourcing toward larger, consolidated estates in countries such as Brazil, where farm size and paperwork norms make compliance more straightforward despite the fact that coffee production has been a massive driver of deforestation there.

One major fear is that Africa’s most fragmented producers, who are often in Africa’s lowest-income countries, could lose out on export markets they’ve worked so hard to build up.

Research from ODI Global describes this as part of a “green squeeze” — climate-linked trade reforms that unintentionally place bureaucratic demands on the poorest producers’ shoulders. Their modeling shows that even a “conservative 10% increase in compliance costs under the EUDR could significantly affect Ethiopia’s GDP, export revenue and livelihoods of these coffee-dependent communities.” In Addis Ababa, ODI was told by partners on the ground that small farmers could be forced out of coffee entirely and into “less sustainable alternatives.”

The EU has offered some support toward supporting compliance, including an initial €70 million package for technical assistance. But advocates warn that recent tweaks to the deforestation rule — including lighter requirements for countries it deems “low risk” — mostly help European operators and do little to relieve burdens elsewhere. Bett argues that incentives would work better: Pay a small premium for compliant coffee, and “you discourage non-compliance.”

Zoom out further, and another challenge looms. Coffee is already on the move — uphill. In parts of Ethiopia, for example, rising temperatures mean that lands once cool enough to support the growth of arabica beans are now too hot. So farmers are forced to seek higher ground to keep yields viable — but those higher altitudes are often forested. Clearing them might keep coffee alive, but it would break EU rules.

So the race is not only against a regulatory deadline but a climate one too. As Emong puts it: Uganda’s end goal is a fairer, fully traceable supply chain — something that his country, and I imagine many others, would be working toward even if it weren’t for the EUDR. The question now is whether farmers can get there fast enough — and who will help them make the climb.

I’ll be following EUDR developments closely in the coming weeks: If you have insights into the regulation and/or its impacts, feel free to get in touch at ayenat.mersie@devex.com.

Background: Why Mia Mottley is lashing out at EU's bid to protect world’s forests
Related: How Meta is uniting with research org WRI to map the world’s forests (Pro)

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Forest friends

A decade after being forced from their ancestral home in Kenya’s Embobut Forest, the Sengwer people are reclaiming their role as stewards of the land, Devex contributor Anthony Langat writes. Luka Kiraton still remembers the day in 2013 when forest guards torched homes and even hurled cooking pots into the flames. The community was told it was all in the name of protecting the Cherangany Forest Water Tower. Many were left hiding in the forest by night and taking farm jobs by day just to survive.

Now the Sengwer are leading a major effort to restore the very ecosystem they were banished from. From a small leased plot on the forest’s edge, they launched their first indigenous tree nursery in 2023 and are drawing on traditional knowledge to revive species that are disappearing fast. As Sengwer human rights defender Elias Kimaiyo puts it, “It is about knowing the correct species of trees and the ecological zones in which they do well.”

Seedlings such as African redwood and rosewood, once hard to source in Kenya, now thrive in tidy rows. The group sold 30,000 seedlings to the Eldoret-Iten Water Fund, which is restoring degraded land upstream of a major western Kenya water supply. The nursery has since expanded inside the forest itself with four acres allocated by the Kenya Forest Service, signaling a tentative turn toward partnership rather than eviction.

Income from the seedlings is helping families stay afloat for the first time in years. As Kimaiyo says, “You know, that is something I can say that for the first time we have benefited.”

Read: How a Kenyan community displaced for conservation now leads the effort

Failing grade

Climate momentum is slipping. The latest World Resources Institute report lands with a gut punch: Out of 45 global indicators meant to track progress toward 2030 targets, zero are where they need to be. “The 1.5 degree limit is in jeopardy,” says WRI’s Ani Dasgupta. This after 2024 averaged 1.55 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures. Not great.

Even the once-celebrated bright spots are starting to dim, my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz writes. Forests are still disappearing at the rate of 22 soccer fields a minute, and efforts to halt deforestation have barely budged. The corporate world’s climate promises are softening too, and electric vehicle sales have slowed in the United States and Europe.

Major emitters aren’t helping. The U.S. has cut back environmental agencies and plans to leave the Paris Agreement again. Mohamed Adow of Power Shift Africa didn’t mince words: “What we’re lacking, and I think it’s important for all of us to acknowledge, is the political will.”

There are sparks of progress. Clean energy investment hit $2 trillion. Renewables now provide more than 40% of global power. China continues its solar boom while expanding green investments abroad. WRI’s report deemed reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production and decreasing ruminant meat consumption in high-consuming regions “right direction, well off track.”

Bottom line: as delegates head to COP30 in Belém, Brazil, the world has the solutions and real momentum in places, but the speed just isn’t matching the scale of the crisis.

Read more: 45 climate goals, 0 on track — the Earth’s failing report card

See also: Deforestation skyrockets as Brazil plans forest-focused COP30

Farming futures for whom?

AGRA’s new Africa Food Systems Report 2025, released in September, bills itself as a bold road map for transformation. Bridget Mugambe of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa sees something else: the same Green Revolution model that has failed to nourish the continent for two decades. In an opinion piece for Devex, she argues it prioritizes corporate-led agribusiness and input-heavy production rather than the “agroecology and food sovereignty that millions of African farmers and citizens are calling for.”

Yes, the report acknowledges that food systems are interconnected. Yes, the challenges are real. Still, Mugambe writes that “its proposed fixes miss the mark.” Fertilizer and mechanization indicators take center stage while smallholder farmers remain cast as suppliers to commodity value chains, not as leaders of ecological change.

The numbers tell the story, Mugambe writes. Africa has posted the fastest agricultural growth in the world since 2000, yet hunger and malnutrition remain stubbornly high. Import bills keep soaring. Inequality deepens.

Mugambe argues that real transformation would back farmer-led solutions, biodiversity, local markets, and justice — not more of the same.

Opinion: Africa needs agroecology, not cosmetic transformations

Chew on this

More food reaches Gaza, but it’s still not enough. [The New York Times]

Sudan’s government has expelled two top World Food Programme officials, declaring them persona non grata amid tensions over reports of widespread hunger. [Sudan Tribune]

Ghana’s banks are not lending enough to sectors where it matters most, such as agriculture and manufacturing. [The Conversation]

Chinese and African experts join forces to advance collaboration on food security, agricultural modernization.  [Xinhua]

The obesity capitals of the world: A new study shows that waistlines are widening almost everywhere. [The Economist]