- The EU Deforestation Regulation applies from 30 December 2026, and Brussels has said it will not delay again.
- Cameroon has built real traceability tools, yet official and independent figures tell very different stories.
- What remains is mostly governance: informal buying, land legality and forest monitoring.
The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) applies to large and medium-sized operators from 30 December 2026. Micro and small operators outside the timber sector follow on 30 June 2027. A simplification package published on 4 May 2026 will, by the Commission’s estimate, cut annual compliance costs by about 75 per cent, but the core rules did not move: no deforestation after 31 December 2020, legal production, and geolocation of every plot.
What Cameroon has built
Cameroon is one of the world’s leading cocoa producers, and about 78 per cent of its cocoa exports go to the EU. The Cocoa and Coffee Interprofessional Council (CICC) runs GEOSHARE, a platform that gives exporters plot-level data. In July 2025, officials said around 99 per cent of cocoa can be traced from plot to port.
An independent preparedness check tells a more cautious story. It found that the CICC had geolocated about 150,000 plots by April 2025, belonging to some 100,000 producers out of an estimated 600,000 nationwide, and that about half of traded volume was geolocated because it is certified under two sustainability standards. Both statements can be true at once. The distance between them is the compliance gap.
Where the gaps are
- Informal buying. Sales to small first buyers, known as coxeurs, are largely untraced.
- Land and legality. Most cocoa land has no title, and some plots sit inside the permanent forest estate. A 2024 forestry law (No. 2024/008) made it easier to declassify permanent forest.
- Monitoring. Cameroon has no operational, independent national forest monitoring system.
- Capacity. Mapping every plot is estimated to cost about EUR 15 million, and the country has only five or six sworn surveyors. Geolocation has also stalled in the South-West, which produces about 30 per cent of output.
What the field shows
I worked on the Sustainable Cocoa Platform, the national action plan for deforestation-free cocoa and the traceability pre-feasibility study, and one point keeps coming back. Traceability is a governance problem before it is a technology problem. The tools are not the hard part. Agreeing who owns the data, who pays to keep it current and what a farmer gains from keeping it accurate is.
Before 30 December
Three things would help most. Settle the national traceability model, including roles, data access and who pays. Find a way to bring informal buyers into the system. And fund the unglamorous work, such as surveyors and data upkeep, rather than only new platforms.
Cameroon’s current EUDR risk classification: Standard (Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1093).
