Post by Farmforce

For a decade, the line on Ethiopian forest coffee has been that producer-level compliance is too hard to run on the ground: too remote, too smallholder-heavy, too institutionally complex. A pilot in the forests of Bale and Illubabor just tested that claim and disproved it. Over eight months, ECOM, the Royal Norwegian Embassy-funded pilot Supporting Ethiopian Coffee Farmers for EUDR-Compliant Marketing, led by Farm Africa with Farmforce as technology partner, built a due diligence-ready producer record across two of Ethiopia's hardest coffee zones:  • 4,543 smallholder producers onboarded  • 4,548 hectares of rare wild forest coffee under management  • 3,619 farms mapped to GPS polygons  • 3,500+ signed consent surveys, each with a photograph and signature  • An ECTA-compliant dataset, ready for Ethiopia's national system The point is not the pilot. It is the model. December 2026 puts producer-level evidence on every EU-bound smallholder origin, and ECOM shows the work is buildable, with friction points identified and fixes tested in the field. We wrote up the full playbook, honest about cost and where it bent. Read it here 👉 https://lnkd.in/eH7TFm_g Rodney Muriuki and the Farmforce team will be at World of Coffee Brussels, 25 to 27 June, Stand 7320. Bring your Ethiopian lots, and we'll map the model to them. #EUDR #Coffee #Traceability #Smallholders #SustainableSourcing #SpecialtyCoffee