“What motivates us most is being able to say, ‘I take care of the environment, I don’t cut down trees, and my coffee will be valued more highly,’” said Victoria Alverca Peña, a farmer for 25 years and co-founder of APECAP, a small coffee and cacao producers’ association in Zamora Chinchipe, a province in the Ecuadorian Amazon. “I’ll be able to sell it under better conditions, and my work will be much more valued.
“In our farms, besides coffee, you’ll find cacao, timber trees, fruit trees and even short-cycle crops,” she added. “When the coffee plants are still young, we can grow crops like corn, cassava or plantains. This helps us a lot with food security.”
At the end of this year, the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is set to go into force, prohibiting products linked to deforestation from entering the EU market. Coffee is among the target commodities, and here in southern Ecuador, a group of coffee growers has been ahead of the curve in preparing for the EUDR implementation. Since 2019, nearly 400 farmers here have adopted a model that combines forest conservation, traceability, and geospatial monitoring as part of the Deforestation-Free Coffee Initiative, at work in 23 areas across the region.
Between 2019-2021, the project developed Ecuador’s first deforestation-free coffee production model. The effort relies on a national protocol developed by the Ecuadorian government and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which uses satellite imagery, traceability systems, and independent verification to track where coffee is grown and whether forests have been cleared or degraded to make way for coffee farms. As part of the initiative, UNDP and the government also work with Italian coffee company Lavazza, which includes Amazonian coffee in its supply chain, creating demand for traceable products.
Between 2022 and 2024, approximately 86 metric tons of this coffee was exported, mainly from Zamora Chinchipe, a densely forested and mountainous province in southern Ecuador that has been consolidating its reputation as a high-altitude coffee-producing hub. The most significant growth occurred in 2025, when exports in a single year matched the combined total for 2022-2024. The initiative has now reached a cumulative 172.5 metric tons over four years.
“This is not just about exporting more tons, but about consolidating a model that demonstrates that conserving Amazonian forests can be compatible with competitiveness, compliance with international regulations and dignified income generation for small producers,” Juan Merino, the project coordinator from the UNDP, told Mongabay by email.
In its early years, the project focused on strengthening the organizational and commercial capacities of producers’ associations, promoting sustainable and deforestation-free farming practices, and developing a traceability system that could meet the requirements of international markets. The gradual incorporation of new producers and price premiums for deforestation-free coffee also encouraged organizations to prioritize this market segment, creating new economic opportunities for farmers in the Amazon region.
Despite its results, experts say the experience still faces challenges in scaling up.
This transformation on the ground comes amid major shifts in requirements for access to the European market. Approved in 2023, the EUDR establishes new rules aimed at preventing deforestation-linked products from a group of seven commodities from entering the EU market. The law was originally due to go into force in December 2024, but has since been postponed twice, first to December 2025 and later to December 2026. The latest deadline applies to large operators and traders, while micro and small enterprises have until June 2027 to comply.
The regulation requires companies to prove that the products they want to sell into the EU don’t come from land deforested after 2020, and to provide detailed geolocation data for production areas. Considered one of the most comprehensive laws ever adopted to tackle deforestation linked to global trade, the regulation has the potential to reshape tropical agricultural supply chains.
Over the past four decades, Ecuador has lost approximately 1.2 million hectares (3 million acres) of forest cover, according to data from MapBiomas Ecuador, a satellite-based land-use monitoring initiative. Over the same period, agriculture, forestry and other productive activities expanded by more than 18%, becoming some of the main drivers of native vegetation loss in the country, including in its Amazonian region.
Analyses by the Amazonian Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information (RAISG), a coalition of research organizations monitoring environmental and social trends across the rainforest, and MapBiomas Amazônia indicate that between 1985 and 2023, the entire Amazon lost more than 88 million hectares (217 million acres) of forest — roughly an eighth of the biome’s original cover, or an area three times the size of Ecuador. During the same period, cropland and pasture areas expanded by approximately 598% in lands cleared of natural vegetation, highlighting intensified land use as a key driver of forest loss across the Amazon region that spans nine South American countries.
In Ecuador, the Deforestation-Free Coffee Initiative emerged as part of broader efforts to reduce pressure on forests, with farmers adopting practices to improve coffee production while maintaining forest cover.
Under the initiative, coffee is grown alongside timber and fruit trees and other crops in agroforestry systems, while producers receive guidance on fertilization, composting and crop management. According to Peña, the local farmer, the goal is to increase productivity on existing farmland rather than clear new areas for cultivation.
The project has also introduced more systematic farm management practices. Farmers are encouraged to keep field notebooks recording harvests, pruning activities, production costs, and other information that helps them monitor their farms over time.
“For many producers, especially older ones, keeping records was difficult at first,” Peña said. “Now, their children and grandchildren often help with the notebooks. We can compare results from previous years, see whether yields improved, and understand what worked and what didn’t.”
APECAP, the association she co-founded, regularly organizes exchanges between farmers, allowing them to compare different approaches to coffee production. “We take a producer harvesting 20 bags and visit one producing 60,” Peña said. In such cases, the higher-yielding farms typically combine denser coffee plantings with shaded cultivation systems, she said. Some farmers have increased planting density from about 2,000 to 3,000 coffee plants per hectare, or about 800-1,200 plants per acre, while also improving fertilization and crop management.
Currently, 373 producers participate in the initiative, with a combined cultivated area of nearly 5,000 hectares (about 12,300 acres). Within these areas, more than 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of natural forest remain conserved. Since the project’s inception, farms have been monitored through georeferenced perimeter mapping, cross-checking with official forest-cover maps and analysis of data from Global Forest Watch. The methodology allows tracking of how the forest cover change on each property over time.
By improving productivity and market access for coffee already cultivated on existing farms, the initiative aims to strengthen sustainable production systems without expanding agricultural areas in the Amazon. The strategy emerged in a region where agricultural expansion has been a major source of pressure on forests. A study produced under Ecuador’s PROAmazonía program found that cattle ranching was the main land use associated with deforestation at national level, while cultivation of coffee, cacao and oil palm were among the agricultural activities linked to expanding farmland in parts of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Regular monitoring helps farmers prove that their coffee comes from farms that haven’t been recently deforested, while working together reduces costs and improves market access.
