NEW YORK, April 22 (Reuters) - Several coffee companies and coffee traders are launching a new system to track deforestation related to coffee cultivation around the world, JDE Peet's, one of the participating companies, said in a statement on Wednesday.
The Coffee Canopy Partnership will use satellite imagery supplied by Airbus, combined with artificial intelligence models, to map coffee farms and identify areas of forest loss nearby.
It said the aim is to correctly identify landscape and work with governments and local communities to restore forests and prevent future deforestation.
Participating in the program along with JDE Peet's, which is now part of Keurig Dr Pepper, are the company Tchibo and commodities traders Louis Dreyfus Company, Sucden, Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Touton and Sucafina.
The system will first target East Africa, covering Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda, the companies said, with the aim of achieving worldwide coverage of all coffee-growing regions in 2027.
Under the EU Deforestation Regulation - expected to enter into force on December 30 for large corporations and June 30, 2027, for micro and small enterprises - coffee grown on land that has been classified as forest after December 2020 may not enter EU markets.
"This threatens to exclude millions of smallholder farmers from key markets, despite their sustainable farming practices, simply because existing maps incorrectly classify their agroforestry or shade-grown coffee production land as forest," said the statement from JDE Peet's.
It added that the initiative will address "the historical lack of precise mapping data, which has frequently resulted in coffee farms... being misidentified as natural forest."
The system will be open for consultation by farmers, governments and the coffee industry, the companies said.
(Reporting by Marcelo TeixeiraEditing by Bill Berkrot)
