Context
EUDR is the first wave
Under the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), companies placing
timber, coffee and other listed commodities on the EU market must
hold geolocation data for every plot of land their goods come
from, checked against an official specification. A due diligence
statement reference is required before the customs declaration.
The regulation is written in Brussels, but the data is produced
on farms and at mills at origin. It arrives as overlapping
polygons, duplicated plots, wrong formats and records written
only in Portuguese. Broken files do not fail loudly; they fail
when the statement has to be filed.
There is a subtler problem underneath. Most Brazilian suppliers
send the polygon from CAR, the national rural environmental
registry. CAR describes the whole property and is self-declared
by its owner. The regulation asks for the production plot, which
is usually a part of it. A CAR file passes every format check and may
still not establish the plot the regulation asks for. Whether it
does has to be demonstrated, not assumed.
EUDR is not an isolated case. CBAM and the digital product
passport follow the same pattern: market access decided on the
quality of supplier data. That data layer is our specialty.