Koraput Grows Coffee Inside a Forest — and Europe's EUDR Could Still Lock It Out

In Koraput — one of Odisha's tribal districts — coffee cultivation looks nothing like a plantation. Farmers here did not clear trees to make room for coffee; the coffee grows beneath them. The forest canopy is, in effect, the farm. There are no straight rows, no cleared hillsides, no fenced perimeter — a plot's boundary is where the bamboo begins or where the slope changes, natural landmarks rather than cadastral surveys or GPS coordinates.

These growers have never registered a plot number, and many farm in pockets with negligible mobile connectivity. Their way of cultivating is, by definition, forest-positive: it keeps the canopy standing rather than replacing it. That is the ground truth on which an incoming European regulation is now about to land.

The pressure comes from Brussels. The European Union Deforestation Regulation — widely known by its initials, EUDR — requires that every kilogram of a regulated commodity, coffee included, sold into European markets be traceable to a specific plot of land, with verified evidence that no forest was cleared on it after 2020.

The intent is defensible: global commodity demand has driven large-scale tropical deforestation, and European buyers want assurance their purchases are not complicit. But the rule was architected around large plantation operators — those with surveyed land titles, GIS teams, and dedicated compliance departments who can absorb both the cost and the process. For a Koraput smallholder whose plot boundary is a stand of bamboo, there is simply no map to hand over. The compliance cost alone — estimated at roughly fifty euro-cents per kilogram — is a heavy share of the roughly three-dollar-per-kilogram price these growers actually receive.

The structural problem with one-size deforestation frameworks is that the burden falls inversely to culpability. The large-scale clearing the regulation targets happens on surveyed plantations that already have the administrative capacity to navigate certification. Koraput's agroforestry smallholders — whose land use is, by definition, forest-positive — lack both the documentation and the infrastructure to prove what they have always done.

The pattern is not new. Privacy and data-protection rules similarly placed disproportionate compliance costs on small actors who posed little of the risk those laws were designed to address. EUDR risks repeating that dynamic at the expense of India's most marginalised coffee growers.

Key asymmetries:

• Large roasters built dedicated EUDR compliance teams ahead of the regulation's enforcement.
• Koraput smallholders hold no formal plot numbers, fenced boundaries, or signal-capable devices.
• The deforestation the rule targets is occurring on plantations, not on these forested hillsides.

Koraput is not an isolated edge case. Across India's tribal and forested coffee-growing regions, agroforestry smallholders farm under customary land arrangements that predate and sit outside formal cadastral systems. EUDR's plot-level geolocation requirement cannot accommodate land whose boundary is where the bamboo starts.

The irony is sharp: these are precisely the communities whose practices the regulation's conservation goals should celebrate. They did not cause the problem the law addresses — yet, without a specific compliance pathway (group certification, community-level mapping, or a formal agroforestry exemption negotiated between Indian trade authorities and the EU) they face exclusion from European markets. India's coffee exporters, the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), and trade negotiators have a narrow window to make this case before enforcement tightens.