Sustainability Policy for Smallholder Farmers: Opportunities

In part one of this three-part series on aligning the needs of smallholder farmers with sustainability regulation, we explored the implications of EUDR from the perspective of smallholder farmers. As illustrated by the Honduran farmer José Darío Enamorado, many rural farmers lack the technology to prove compliance with EUDR, thus losing access to important markets. Furthermore, as well as potentially excluding vulnerable farmers, EUDR has unintended environmental consequences: Many smallholder farmers use traditional regenerative agricultural systems – such as agroforestry – that provide multiple precious ecosystem services; however, the dense forest cover of these plantations means that up to 80% of these plantations are not identifiable even from satellite view, making these healthy farming systems a legal risk for farmers to continue. In part two of this series, we explored how digital technologies – including mobile applications for land cover monitoring and crop yield estimation developed by the Alliance – could allow smallholder farmers to demonstrate their compliance, and finally, in this final piece we explore how to go a step further, finding ways for smallholder farmers to adjust to this changing global policy environment.