Costa Rica’s famous coffee industry says it’s nearly ready for EUDR. The upcoming European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) requires that all coffee shipped into the EU not come from recently deforested land, prompting Costa Rica to develop a pilot program with its largest coffee cooperative. The initial program provided tools and training to help growers, processors, roasters and exporters comply with the new rules. Over the past year, this pilot has expanded, giving these resources to all coffee producers nationally — and bringing Costa Rica closer to being one of the first nations to certify an entire sector as EUDR-ready.

Costa Rica’s success serves as an important case study for the coffee industry, both in how others might prepare for the new rules, and why they may struggle in comparison.

“I think we’ve seen a lot of discourse that says it’s basically impossible to comply with this law, and pilots like [Costa Rica’s] showcase that this is a wrong narrative,” said Janina Grabs, associate professor of sustainability research at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who studies agricultural commodities. “But they also showcase the alternative narrative, which is more truthful, which is that it’s going to be harder for some to comply than others.”

Coffee is one of seven commodities covered by the EUDR; the others are cattle, cocoa, palm oil, rubber, soy and timber. While coffee’s impact is fractional compared to the massive deforestation undergone for cattle, palm oil and soy, the World Resources Institute estimates that between 2001 and 2015, coffee replaced nearly 1.9 million hectares (nearly 4.7 million acres) of forest — deforesting an area the size of 350 football fields every day.

Under the EUDR, businesses importing into the EU are responsible for providing a due diligence statement showing that these commodities were not produced on land that was deforested after 2020, and that they follow all relevant local laws. The EUDR adopted these new regulations in 2023. They were first meant to go into force at the end of 2024, though enforcement has since been delayed to Dec. 30, 2026, for large and medium-sized businesses, and June 30, 2027 for micro- and small operators.

Costa Rica, which ships 33% of its coffee to the EU, began preparing for the new rules early. For a commodity like coffee — grown, roasted, processed and packaged — complying with the new rules starts at the beginning.

The country’s initial pilot provided training and workshops on EUDR rules to producers, processors and exporters via CoopeTarrazú, the country’s largest growers’ cooperative. This included assessing the best georeferencing technologies (including satellite imagery and AI programs) to certify which farms had not been deforested since 2020, as well as establishing guidelines for producers, due diligence processes, and documentation chains to ensure that Costa Rican coffee could be traced through its entire production process.

This pilot was developed by the Costa Rican Coffee Institute (ICAFE) with support from the United Nations Development Programme’s Results-Based Payments (RBP) initiative. The latter provides financial incentives for greenhouse gas reductions as part of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) scheme.

The pilot program shipped the first 19 metric tons of confirmed deforestation-free coffee to Italy in March of 2024. Since then, ICAFE has made these resources available to the country’s entire coffee-growing sector and started training producers from all coffee-growing regions on the EUDR standards. ICAFE says it has so far georeferenced about 40% of the country’s coffee-growing area. It has also certified 800,000 units of unprocessed coffee cherries (the fruit that contains the coffee bean) as deforestation-free—the equivalent of nearly 36,000 metric tons of finished product.

According to Felipe Fallas Naranjo, project manager at CoopeTarrazú, the pilot was particularly effective at helping coffee producers understand the complex new regulations and in mapping farms. But Costa Rica’s strong existing environmental regulations, and its coffee industry’s existing sustainability programs, also meant that they had a head start.

“I believe that the country as a whole was well prepared to take on this challenge,” Fallas Naranjo said.

This, said sustainability professor Grabs, is key. Though she called ICAFE’s pilot program impressive (“I don’t want to downplay it,” she said), it’s not typical — many coffee-growing regions lack Costa Rica’s environmental rules, infrastructure and support.

“Out of all the cooperatives in the world that the UNDP could have picked to support, they picked one where they were most likely pretty confident that they would succeed, because they have already made a lot of effort in setting up good practices,” Grabs said. “It’s still hard, there’s still work behind it, but I think they’re building on a very good foundation.”

Costa Rica outlawed forest cover changes in 1996, and has since become the first Latin American country to actually reverse deforestation: its forest cover has doubled from 26% of its total land area in the 1980s, to more than 58% in 2023. Agroforestry is common within the coffee industry, and many of the country’s well-organized cooperatives already have systems in place to certify them for niche coffee markets, such as organic or rainforest-friendly labels.

In contrast, Grabs gave the example of Ethiopia. Though known as the ancestral home of coffee, the vast majority of Ethiopia’s coffee industry — an estimated 95% — is made up of smallholders, many of whom don’t belong to cooperatives or have any major organizational support. For many of these growers, the challenge is not an ecological one, but a bureaucratic one: though many of these farmers aren’t contributing to deforestation, the industry at large doesn’t currently have the resources to create the documents needed to prove EUDR compliance.

In countries where there is significant deforestation, Grabs said there’s a risk that operators and traders might instead segment — sending products that can already prove compliance with EUDR to the EU, and shipping those that would take additional work to certify elsewhere.

As a result, Grabs said she’s skeptical about how much the new regulations will truly prevent deforestation. “I have studied certification systems in the past, and what we see [is] the farmers already closest to compliance get certified because it has the least cost for them and [the highest] potential economic benefit,” Grabs said. As a result, “the extra sustainability that we are creating in the world thanks to these schemes is likely very limited.”

Questions like these have abounded since the EUDR was announced, and only multiplied as the enforcement delay has opened the door to potential weakening of the regulation. Still, progress within national policy and private organizations provides some early signals of what the EUDR might yet accomplish.

Vietnam, which still sees significant agriculture-driven deforestation, has implemented a national plan that includes stronger monitoring for at-risk forests and investing in impacted growers’ livelihoods, as well as traceability and mapping efforts like Costa Rica’s. And consumer goods company Unilever is taking on the responsibility for mapping small, independent oil palm farms to ensure that its many palm oil-containing products meet the EUDR, which could help alleviate concerns that smallholders with fewer resources to prove their compliance would simply be pushed out by larger farms.

Grabs said one benefit of regulations like the EUDR is that they can be a preventive measure against backsliding; if a country like Costa Rica were to, say, repeal antideforestation laws following a change in leadership, the pressure to continue selling to the EU might prevent growers from taking advantage of loosened regulations.

And should other countries go in the same direction as the EUDR, the potential for global change becomes even greater. “We believe that if China, India, the US and Japan took the EU’s lead and emulated these key legal steps, then nearly 75% of the world’s imported deforestation could be eliminated within a few years,” Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of environmental campaign group Mighty Earth, told The Guardian when the regulation was passed in 2023.

As the EUDR enforcement deadlines draws closer, the UNDP told Mongabay that the organization and its Climate and Forests Programme is interested in supporting other countries that ask for help to set up pilot programs like Costa Rica’s.

“It is important to note that Costa Rica, through ICAFE, has shared its experience with several countries in the region and has provided openness and institutional support so that other countries can adapt and implement similar actions according to their own contexts and needs,” Maureen Ballestero Vargas, the REDD+ RBP coordinator in Costa Rica, wrote in an email.

Banner image: Examining coffee plants in the fields of a CoopeTarrazú grower. 

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Jeremy Hance Editor

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AgricultureCoffeeDeforestationEnvironmentEnvironmental LawEnvironmental PolicyInternational TradeSustainabilityTradeTropical DeforestationTropical ForestsCentral AmericaCosta RicaEuropean UnionLatin America

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