What the EUDR is, and who it reaches

The EU Deforestation Regulation, what it requires from anyone placing cattle, timber, coffee, soy, cocoa, palm oil or rubber on the EU market, and how that requirement travels down to individual Brazilian suppliers.

Last reviewed 2 August 2026

What the regulation actually requires

The EUDR requires companies placing certain commodities on the EU market — cattle, timber, coffee, cocoa, soy, palm oil and rubber, plus derived products such as leather, furniture and chocolate — to demonstrate that production was not associated with deforestation after a cut-off date of 31 December 2020.

What it asks for is not a general sustainability statement. It requires geolocation of each plot of production — plot coordinates, not just a municipality — cross-referenced against forest cover data, and assembled into a Due Diligence Statement filed per import consignment.

Why this becomes your problem, not only your supplier’s

The legal obligation sits with the operator placing goods on the EU market. That is you, not the Brazilian producer. Your supplier is not regulated by the EUDR; you are, and your statement has to reflect the origin of every animal, every bag of coffee, every timber consignment, back to the property where it was produced.

In practice this means the compliance documentation of each individual supplier — not just your direct counterparty — becomes part of your own filing. A supplier who cannot produce that evidence quickly stops being a viable option, even when there is nothing actually wrong with the product.

What the evidence actually consists of

For a Brazilian rural supplier, assembling it means pulling the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) record for each property, overlaying that against INPE deforestation data — PRODES for the consolidated annual series, DETER for near-real-time alerts — checking IBAMA environmental embargoes tied to that property or to the company’s tax number, and checking overlap with indigenous lands and federal conservation units.

Each of those uses a different source, a different format and a different lookup method. Doing it once for one supplier is an afternoon’s work. Doing it across a supplier portfolio, and repeating it whenever a shipment depends on it, is not.

The failure mode nobody plans for

The common outcome of a supplier who cannot answer an evidence request quickly is not a fine. It is a shipment that does not move, or a supplier quietly replaced by one who already had the paperwork. The cost lands as delay and disruption in your own supply chain, well before any regulator is involved.

That is worth understanding before you design your process around penalties. The enforcement risk is real, but the operational risk arrives first and far more often.

Where BrazilTrace fits

BrazilTrace does not produce or file your Due Diligence Statement — that remains yours, or your authorised representative’s, before the EU authorities. What we do is assemble and continuously maintain the origin evidence underneath it: CAR, deforestation via INPE PRODES and DETER, IBAMA embargoes, and indigenous land and conservation unit overlap, for each supplier, continuously, rather than only at the moment somebody asks.

Common questions

Does the EUDR only apply to large importers?

The obligation attaches to the product and its origin, not to company size, though the regulation does phase deadlines differently by operator size. Smaller operators get an additional window. The evidence requirement itself propagates back to individual suppliers regardless of anyone’s size.

Are the EUDR and the US Lacey Act the same thing?

No. Different jurisdictions, different mechanisms. The EUDR centres on geolocation and deforestation against a cut-off date. The Lacey Act centres on declaring species and legal origin for timber products. A supplier selling into both markets may need to satisfy both, with partially overlapping but non-identical documentation.

Do we need a lawyer for this?

For the Due Diligence Statement itself and for compliance decisions, yes — that is specialist work and explicitly not what we do. What can be automated is the step before that decision: gathering and keeping current the origin evidence the statement relies on, for every supplier in your chain.

Every figure we publish carries its source and the date we retrieved it — see the methodology, or check a company against the forced-labour register directly. This guide is general information, not legal advice.