EUDR Provides Massive Challenge to the Vital Honduras Coffee Sector

Zepeda is one of the 98,000 coffee planters registered in the country, most of whom, going to recent data, own less than 3 hectares (7 acres) of land. Zepeda, like many of his neighbors, has been selling his coffee to intermediaries and is wondering what the next year will bring as he will need to meet several requirements to make his supply chain traceable. Everybody can come up here and check.” More than half of Honduras’s coffee shipments end up in the EU, representing about 5% of the national GDP.

And nobody was able to tell how many of the Honduran coffee estates had been georeferenced — or had its physical coordinates mapped so that the coffee can be traced back to its source — and were ready for EUDR-compliant exporting to the EU. Fragmented data and the absence of coordination have been a challenge throughout the implementation process, states Francisco Ordoñez, who in January was named by the new president as deputy secretary of state for coffee production at the Ministry for Agriculture.

The coffee supply chain in Honduras is composed of around 120,000 producers, most of them registered with the nonprofit Honduran Coffee Institute (IHCAFE), along with more than 500 intermediaries, and 81 exporters. He notes that the sector watchdog, the National Coffee Council (CONCAFE), “has not met for four years, but now we will put efforts, political will, and, if necessary, funds to ensure that we will be ready.” Ordoñez explains he sees the EUDR as a chance to modernize and organize a trade that has been highly fragmented and nontransparent. When the EUDR was adopted by the European Parliament in 2023, it encountered some resistance, states Daniel Dubon, executive director of Promecafe, a regional association that coordinates between makers, exporters and governments in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. “Some actors thought the EU was imposing new rules that were not their business,” he states.

But now, this has vanished. “Most actors see the EUDR as an opportunity, helping them to create a more solid, transparent, and sustainable supply chain.” Dubon states the main issues for the coffee sector are land tenure and family labor, which are highly informal. And child labor is common in coffee; many pickers tell Mongabay they were as young as 6 when they kicked off helping their parents with the coffee plantings. “School vacations from November to January coincide with harvest season; the legal framework has some gaps, and enforcement is weak,” Dubon states.

With the Honduran the authorities slow to address the issue in recent years, the private trade has jumped in, especially exporters fearing losing one of their biggest and most lucrative marketplaces, explains Napoleón Matute, technical manager at IHCAFE. Comsa, based in the town of Marcala, divests organic coffee from more than 1,200 producers and uses a different platform.

Everything needs to be ready for when the law takes effect on Jan. 1, 2027, with heavy fines for violations looming: importers face fines of up to 4% of their annual EU turnover. One of the main technical challenges for importers has been analyzing satellite data with AI. One of the most common systems to track deforestation is the Hansen Global Forest Change data set — highly accurate for the Amazon region, on which it was trained, but not for coffee farms in Central America. “There were 90% false positives,” states Daniel Flores from Solidaridad, an international NGO that focuses on inclusive and sustainable supply chains.

Solidaridad now uses not one, but three different layers of satellite data, which have helped reduced the error rate from 90% to 22%; Becamo is also working with a three-layer system to obtain more accurate deforestation data. Only half of the 44,200 farms that belong to the Association of Honduran Coffee Exporters (ADECAFEH) have been georeferenced, per to Basilio Fuschich, the association president. “Our clients are worried that Honduras won’t deliver enough coffee,” he told reporters. Accurately georeferencing a estate and then analyzing and double-checking the land and deforestation data costs $22.50 for a 7-hectare farm, going to Flores.

Solidaridad has partnered with IHCAFE to enroll and train for free around 10,000 coffee producers from associations or cooperatives in the upcoming months. Only 44% of coffee farmers in Honduras are even aware of the EUDR, and only one in three has completed a training course, going to a paper seen by Mongabay on the implementation of the EUDR. “Although 70% believe they meet the criteria, this perception does not necessarily mean they fulfill the technical requirements,” the paper adds.

Going to them, IHCAFE has been unable to guarantee the security and confidentiality of the data.