Does requesting geolocation data differ by country of origin?
Yes, and you will notice this especially in practice, less so in the text of the regulation itself. The Deforestation Regulation requires geolocation data for each plot where the raw material originates, regardless of which country that plot is located in. This requirement is the same everywhere. What does differ is how easily you can obtain reliable coordinates, in what form your supplier provides them, and how well those data can be verified.
This difference is not in the law, but in the infrastructure of the country of origin. Some countries have a digital cadastre in which plots are already registered with coordinates. Other countries work with paper ownership documents, oral agreements on land use, or a system in which a cooperative manages the land on behalf of hundreds of smallholder farmers. For you as a coffee roaster, timber trader or cocoa buyer, this means a very different conversation with your supplier, depending on where they are located.
Why a digital cadastre makes the difference
In countries with a well-developed digital cadastre, a plot is often already recorded with exact boundaries and a unique registration number. Your supplier then mainly needs to make the correct link between the consignment you are purchasing and the plot it comes from. In countries without such a system, that link often still needs to be established, for example through a GPS measurement on site or through satellite imagery that subsequently estimates a boundary. This takes time, and the accuracy of the result depends on who carried out the measurement and with what instrument.
This directly affects what you can do with that data. Coordinates from an official cadastre are generally easier to trace than a polygon that a supplier has drawn in themselves based on an estimate. For larger plots, the regulation calls for a polygon instead of a single point, and it is precisely here that the difference between a well-registered system and an informal measurement is greatest. For details on how geolocation data are structured and what form applies, see the knowledge base by topic.
Language, coordinate system and document format
A second difference lies in the way countries record coordinates. Not every country uses the same coordinate system, and not every document you receive has already been converted into the form that the EU information system expects. A PDF with a handwritten plot number, an export from a local agricultural register, or an Excel file from a cooperative are all sources that must first be traced and verified before they are usable for a file. There is often also a language difference: the underlying documentation is not always prepared in English or Dutch.
This is also where many small and medium-sized enterprises get stuck, not because the rule is unclear, but because the sources are structured so differently from country to country. If you want to know precisely what role and what obligation applies to your situation before you enter into those conversations with suppliers in different countries, you can can have it calculated in a few questions.
What this means for your own file
For your file, the practical consequence is that you cannot approach every supplier with a single fixed questionnaire. A supplier in a country with a strong cadastral system can probably deliver faster and more accurately than a supplier working with small, scattered plots and having to measure themselves. That said, nothing about it reflects the risk assigned to the country of origin; that is a separate assessment independent of how well the geodata infrastructure is set up. It mainly means that when building a file per product stream, you account for longer processing times in some countries of origin, and for additional verification steps to validate the coordinates provided.
The legal risk assessment of your products and countries of origin always remains with you as an economic operator or trader; we structure and validate the data you provide, but we do not express an opinion on whether a specific stream is deforestation-free. Frequently asked questions about what does and does not fall under this obligation are clearly laid out at the FAQ page.
Start with an overview of your own situation
If you do not yet know exactly what role you have, which product it affects, and from when the obligation applies to you, that is the first question to answer before you approach suppliers abroad. To learn more about how we collect and verify that data, read the page that explains where the information comes from. The free role check provides initial direction within a few minutes, without requiring an account.