The Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA) is racing against time to geomap all land under coffee in the country in a bid to with strict European Union Deforestation Regulations (EUDR) by December 30, 2025.
The EU regulations require all exporters to prove that the products they deliver to the market are not from land deforested after December 31, 2020.
AFA Director General Dr Bruno Linyiru said Kenya has so far geomapped 30 percent of coffee farmers accounting for 32,688 hectares out of 109,384 hectares under coffee in 16 of counties.
The EU had initially set the compliance deadline for December 2024, before it was extended to allow compliance.
“Those products need to be traceable to land that has not been deforested. The regulation applies to commodities viewed by the European Union as linked to deforestation namely coffee, cocoa, soy, beef, palm oil, rubber and wood. To ensure full implementation of the regulation, the Government through the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development has embarked on a process to map all the parcels of land under coffee farming in the country,” Linyiru says through a Press statement released to Media houses on Monday.
The EUDR aims to ensure that a set of key products traded and consumed in the EU and globally no longer contribute to deforestation and forest degradation.
“This mapping exercise is being coordinated by the Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA) who is the regulator of all scheduled crops, as mandated by the Crops Act, 2013,” he said.
Linyiru said several teams under the EUDR Data Committee comprising of the State Department of Agriculture (SDA), State Department for Cooperatives, Kenya Forest Service (KFS), Kenya Space Agency (KSA), Directorate of Remote Survey and Remote Sensing (DRSRS) and Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organization are expected to complete the exercise in two months.
“The exercise is expected to be completed in due time, to meet the deadlines set in the EUDR. Kenyans exports 95% of its coffee, with approximately 55% exported to the EU, mainly Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and Finland,” he said.
Over the past five years, Kenya exported 122,699 Metric Tonnes (MT) of clean coffee to the EU, worth Sh90 billion.
Smallholder farmers contribute approximately 70% of Kenya’s total coffee forming the backbone of the rural economy in 33 coffee-growing counties.
