Part 5: Compliance race – challenges from EU market | Vietnam Today

The European market alone accounts for 65% of its total export.

Any change in this market directly affects the business, requiring constant adaptation to new demand.

We plan to expand our supply chain to work directly with farming households, enhancing both sustainability and traceability.

We are preparing all the documents related to origin chasing and crop geolocation.

Under the EU deforestation regulation, EUDR, coffee exported to the UU must not be linked to deforestation and must provide precise geoloccation data for the cultivation area.

The biggest challenge of Vietnamese businesses lies in traceability due to fragmented and small scale farming.

Right now we are struggling to survey every single household.

There are a few farms over four hectares while most are under that size.

You can see how fragmented our coffee growing areas are.

These small households don't often have any land certificates or official documents.

With such small scale production, businesses must deploy significant human resources to verify each farm and household.

This leads to increased cost and human resource pressure when collecting and processing data.

EUDR is just one of several new regulations that EU plans to enforce on important goods in the near future.

Others like the carbon border adjustment mechanism or CBAM and anti greenwashing laws demand even deeper changes from upgrading production technology to building greener supply chains.