Meridia and Rabo Foundation have launched a collaboration to support smallholder farmers in complying with the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). This partnership aims to provide 19 cooperatives, traders, and processors in Africa and Latin America with field data verification and EUDR compliance validation, ensuring they can maintain EU market access for their coffee and cocoa.
Collaboration in the supply chains is key to ensuring smallholder farmers retain access to markets and better prices. Investing in field data validation is an opportunity for agribusinesses, traders (operators), and service providers to support the inclusion of smallholder farmers, as it paves the way for improved compliance and growth potential. Maintaining access to regulated supply chains, including the EU market, can help businesses secure their financial future and enhance operational stability.
To address this, Rabo Foundation offers access to Meridia Verify for a reduced price, and Meridia delivers its access and support to the participants. The collaboration enables better data validation, increased preparedness, and actionable insights for smallholder farmers.
Cocoa from Uganda
Latitude Trade Company, a Uganda-based cocoa exporter, is leveraging Meridia Verify to support its 8,000-strong farmer network.
Karlijn Arbouw, responsible for data management and impact reporting at Latitude Trade Company, highlighted the project's impact, stating,
"Meridia Verify has enhanced our data validation process by addressing gaps in data availability and incomplete datasets. Acting as a '4-eye principle', it complements our own checks, ensuring data quality meets the highest standards."
We previously relied on our own scripts to validate polygons using open datasets. However, some of this data was outdated, and we had concerns about its quality. Furthermore, not all the datasets we required were publicly available. Integrating large raster datasets also presented a technical challenge that exceeded our expertise. Verify helps us address these gaps in data analysis and offers an additional layer of validation for the checks we already perform.
Coffee from Uganda
Zombo Coffee Partners is another Uganda-based organisation that uses Meridia Verify to prepare its operations for EUDR compliance. Andy Carlton, Co-founder & Managing Director, says,
"We are using Meridia Verify to assess our EUDR readiness. We anticipate that challenges will arise once the EUDR goes live, and we want to ensure that we have everything aligned well before December 2025. We hope Verify will be the key to achieving that."
Empowering smallholder farmers and sustaining market access
The partnership between Meridia and Rabo Foundation demonstrates the significance of collaboration by offering crucial tools and support for verifying field data and EUDR compliance validation. It assists agribusinesses and farmers in overcoming regulatory challenges and boosting their capacity to succeed in global markets.
With the one-year postponement of the EUDR deadline, Rabo Foundation and Meridia will have additional time to support their partners in field data verification and validation for EUDR compliance, ensuring they are well-prepared by December 2025.
