KRABI, Thailand — Beneath a humid canopy of rubber trees, Sathit Phromraksa pauses to inspect a coagulated ball of rubber in a palm-sized bowl fastened to a trunk. Last night, he and his wife worked their way through the plantation, carefully carving a line in the bark of each tree to stimulate the flow of milky latex. With a total 500 trees to tap in their 1.6-hectare (4-acre) plantation, their work took them from midnight to 3:30 a.m.
“I inherited this rubber farm from my father,” says 59-year-old Sathit, a lifelong resident of Namgaan subdistrict in Thailand’s Krabi province. “Back then, my family used a lot of chemicals to control weeds and pests, but now, we follow organic practices.”
Sathit is one of roughly 1.7 million smallholders who produce 90% of Thailand’s natural rubber supply across millions of individual plantations, most of them no bigger than his. For many, staying profitable is a constant challenge amid fluctuating market prices, crop diseases and climate change.
Now, the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is poised to add to the pressures facing small-scale producers like Sathit. Under the law, set to take effect in January 2027, only suppliers who can prove their land wasn’t cleared after Dec. 31, 2020, will be allowed to continue selling rubber to EU markets.
As the world’s leading natural rubber producer, the economic implications for Thailand are significant. While the bulk of its exports go to China and Malaysia, the value of Thai rubber entering the EU increased by roughly 65% between 2019 and 2024, according to the World Integrated Trade Solution database. Meanwhile, Thailand’s rubber industry supports roughly one-quarter of domestic households engaged in agriculture.
The new rules have been broadly welcomed as a vital step to curb deforestation and reduce the footprint of EU consumption on forests. However, the new law presents significant challenges for both traders and producers, particularly the requirement that companies verify their products as deforestation-free by tracing their products back along entire supply chains to the farm plots where they were grown.
Thailand’s rubber supply chain is highly fragmented. Millions of smallholder farmers supply thousands of intermediaries, who in turn channel raw rubber to more than 200 processing factories before goods are exported to international markets like the EU.
Within the existing system, traders and middlemen commonly mix rubber batches without requesting origin or legality documentation from producers. Combined rubber from multiple different sources is then sold to processors who don’t typically need to trace the origins of shipments. Therefore, producers, traders and processors will have to update their practices if they wish to continue supplying EU markets.
The burden of change is particularly heavy on smallholder producers. From precise digital mapping of farm plots to proving legal land tenure and evidence of business practices that respect labor and human rights, the new rules demand skills and technologies that are beyond the means of many farmers.
Experts warn that without technical or financial support, the EUDR could leave millions of small-scale producers unable to comply, potentially shutting them out of European markets in favor of bigger producers who can more easily adapt. With the industry so heavily dependent on small-scale producers, both government and private-sector groups are pitching in.
Rubber ranks high on the global list of commodities most responsible for forest loss, behind beef, soy and palm oil. The industry has been responsible for 4 million hectares (10 million acres) of deforestation across Southeast Asia since 1993, an area roughly the size of Switzerland. In Thailand, forest conversion to rubber peaked in the 1990s, driven by government incentives that established the commodity among the country’s top five agricultural exports.
While regulation delivered through the Rubber Authority of Thailand (RAOT) has slowed rubber-linked deforestation in most production areas, climate warming is creating increasingly favorable conditions for growing rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) in the north and northeast, raising concerns that new forest areas could be opened up for cultivation.
With the EUDR implementation date approaching, RAOT is leading the georeferencing of farm plots in Thailand. With millions of parcels of land contributing to the country’s rubber output, it’s a formidable challenge and a real-world illustration of what EUDR compliance looks like on the ground.
The agency has so far mapped more than 3.1 million hectares (about 7.7 million acres), or roughly 79% of the country’s total rubber production area, according to a 2024 report published by RAOT in partnership with the European Forest Institute. RAOT is also exploring the development of a rubber traceability system modeled on a producer self-declaration process currently operated in Thailand’s timber sector.
Private-sector companies wishing to maintain ties with high-value EU markets are also joining in the efforts to support producers. Agriac, an intermediary firm sourcing natural rubber from smallholder farmers across 19 Thai provinces, already operates a traceability system designed to meet the standards of the Forest Stewardship Council’s (FSC) voluntary sustainability scheme, which the firm claims is EUDR-ready.
As an intermediary, or “middleman” firm in the rubber supply chain, Agriac oversees the transfer of raw rubber from farm plots to processing factories, where it’s turned into concentrated latex and industrial-grade sheeting ready for manufacturing.
Their traceability platform, named Traztru, is based on software developed in-house. Farmers enrolled in the system have their farm plots georeferenced and mapped by Agriac field staff, and the platform maintains traceable records of land title deeds and farm operations that comply with FSC standards.
Staff at rubber collection points log the details of each batch of rubber delivered by registered farmers into the Traztru system, and the information is forwarded with each consolidated consignment of rubber to processing factories. Agriac is now partnering with factories in Surat Thani, Narathiwat, Yala and Songkhla provinces to standardize the use of the platform further along the supply chain.
“The traceability is being done forward,” says Maiprae Loyen, the company’s managing director. She says the digital system enables users to view details about shipments, including the identity of producers, their legal rights to use plots of land and the geographic coordinates of the land.
Agriac works exclusively with smallholders, most of whom are registered with cooperatives, Maiprae says. This includes 9,665 smallholders who meet FSC certification standards. Working with collection centers organized under cooperatives helps ensure strict separation of compliant and noncompliance rubber, she notes. This ensures processing factories requesting sustainable produce receive uncontaminated supplies.
