Major Coffee Firms Launch Satellite Tracking System to Map Deforestation Across East Africa

The initiative is designed to ensure compliance with the EU Deforestation Regulation and to protect millions of smallholder farmers from losing access to European markets.

Scale and Partners

The partnership covers 1.2 million square kilometres in its pilot phase, spanning Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi — the heartland of African coffee production. JDE Peet’s is leading the effort alongside Tchibo, Louis Dreyfus Company, Sucden, Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Touton, and Sucafina. Airbus is supplying high-resolution Pléiades and Pléiades Neo imagery, providing the granular satellite data on which the system’s analytical models depend.

The EU Deforestation Regulation, which sets a cut-off date of 31 December 2020 for goods linked to deforestation, requires importers to demonstrate that commodities entering European markets were not produced on land deforested after that date. For coffee — one of Africa’s most important export commodities — the compliance burden falls disproportionately on smallholder farmers who lack the documentation and geospatial data to prove their eligibility.

The Misclassification Problem

The partnership addresses a specific and commercially significant risk: the misclassification of agroforestry systems under existing mapping approaches. Shade-grown coffee, which is common across East Africa, often resembles natural forest cover on older satellite imagery and standard land-use maps. Without accurate differentiation, compliant farms risk being flagged as deforestation-linked, potentially excluding millions of smallholders from EU market access entirely.

Machine-learning models developed for the programme can now identify precise farm boundaries and distinguish coffee plots from surrounding forest with high accuracy, even in the complex, fragmented landscapes typical of East African highland agriculture. Laurent Sagarra, Vice President for Engagement at JDE Peet’s, has described the initiative as a sector-led push that moves beyond single-firm compliance efforts toward landscape-scale collaboration — a pre-competitive model in which data is shared across the supply chain rather than siloed within individual companies.

Open Data and Supply Chain Transparency

The mapping outputs will be made available to governments, communities, and farmers, supporting land-use verification, restoration planning, and sustainable agricultural development. Eric Even, Head of Space Digital at Airbus, noted the system’s capacity to process vast datasets and detect forest-loss patterns near farming areas — a capability that has direct implications for risk management across global agricultural supply chains.

The partnership plans to expand coverage to all major coffee-growing regions worldwide from 2027, and the consortium is actively inviting additional industry participants to join. The model is explicitly pre-competitive: it operates upstream of certification and trading relationships, creating a shared evidence base that any actor in the supply chain can use.

Investment Implications

For investors tracking agricultural supply chain risk, the Coffee Canopy Partnership represents a material development. The EU Deforestation Regulation is tightening the compliance requirements for commodities entering Europe, and coffee supply chains that cannot demonstrate deforestation-free sourcing face exclusion from the world’s largest consumer market. Companies and funds exposed to East African coffee — whether through commodity trading, consumer brands, or ESG-mandated portfolios — have a direct interest in the infrastructure being built by this partnership.

More broadly, the initiative reflects a growing convergence between satellite technology, AI-driven analytics, and regulatory compliance in agricultural supply chains. Sustainable agrotech firms operating in this space stand to benefit as demand for verification and transparency tools accelerates.

For East Africa’s coffee producers, the partnership offers a pathway to remain competitive under regulatory frameworks that might otherwise favour larger, better-documented supply chains at the expense of the smallholders who produce the majority of the region’s coffee.

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