28% of the world’s cocoa and coffee traders source from Latin America. 76% of producers in the region and elsewhere are planning regenerative projects. 69% still cite cost as the biggest blocker. This is what Amsterdam Cocoa Week’s LatAm voices, led by CNCH’s Alejandro Gil Aguirre, added to the picture.
The room in Amsterdam
At Amsterdam Cocoa Week, the first half of the panel was a conversation on West Africa. Geolocation deadlines, supplier readiness, and the scramble to close compliance gaps before the next EUDR milestone. Then the moderator pulled the discussion south, and the tone shifted.
Alejandro Gil Aguirre, Director de Compras y Fomento Agrícola at Colombia’s Compañía Nacional de Chocolates (CNCH), did not come to Amsterdam to report on EUDR progress. He came to put a different question on the table: now that origins in LatAm have spent two years building the data, systems, and field teams to be compliant, what do they actually do with that infrastructure? Who pays for it to exist past 2026? And what, commercially, is the argument for treating compliance as anything other than a cost line on an origin’s P&L?
That is a different question than the one the industry has been answering. And it is the question the 2026 Farmforce Traceability Barometer (the Farmforce report built on an anonymous online survey fielded by NielsenIQ across 76 cocoa and coffee supply chain respondents between November 2025 and January 2026) is best positioned to address for LatAm specifically.
What the Barometer actually says about Latin America
The most common mistake people make when reading a traceability report is treating LatAm as a small side story alongside West Africa. It is not.
Among the traders and processors surveyed, the segment that carries most of the commercial weight in cocoa and coffee supply chains, 28% source primarily from Latin America, making it the second-largest sourcing region after West/Central Africa (33%) and well ahead of East/Southern Africa (13%) and Asia-Pacific (15%). When the sample is filtered to cocoa specifically, 20% of respondents source from LatAm; for coffee, 27%. And when respondents named the country where their traceability, sustainability, and compliance teams are based, the LatAm footprint was visible throughout: Ecuador (11% for cocoa), Colombia (cited by 8% of traders/processors and as a top-three cocoa team base), plus Nicaragua and Honduras on the coffee side.
A note on how to read these numbers. The Barometer is a Farmforce report based on an anonymous online survey of 76 self-selected cocoa and coffee respondents. It is not a peer-reviewed academic study, and its figures should be read as directional trends rather than as absolute, verified population statistics. What makes them useful is not any one percentage point in isolation; it is the consistency of the pattern across the producer, trader, and processor segments, and the way it aligns with what LatAm operators are already saying and doing in the field. That is the spirit in which every number in this piece is cited.
In other words, the decisions shaping how cocoa and coffee are traced, verified, and paid for are already being made in LatAm at a material scale. Any industry-level conversation about what comes after EUDR needs a LatAm chapter. And any LatAm operator planning their next three years needs to know what the regional peer group is actually doing.
The operational burden: Alejandro’s argument, paraphrased
The thrust of Alejandro’s intervention in Amsterdam was pragmatic, not ideological. It went roughly like this.
EUDR compliance, in a narrow technical sense, is a solvable problem. Geolocation data can be captured. Deforestation risk can be assessed. Due diligence statements can be filed. These are not trivial tasks, but they are bounded, and the trader/processor segment has largely absorbed them: the Barometer shows that 56% of traders/processors are either fully compliant (19%) or mostly compliant (37%), with only 15% not yet started.
The harder problem is what compliance has structurally asked of origins. Over the past two to three years, producer organizations and cooperatives, particularly in LatAm, have been asked to become data companies, agronomy providers, social compliance monitors, and climate partners, often simultaneously and often without a corresponding change in farm-gate pricing or long-term commercial commitments. The Barometer captures the cost of that asymmetry with brutal clarity: 69% of producers cite cost and resources as their single biggest challenge in improving first-mile traceability and sustainability. That is the highest pain-point score in the entire producer dataset.
Alejandro’s implied argument was that compliance-as-a-cost-line is a losing frame for everyone in the chain. If downstream buyers pay only for the minimum viable artifact (a polygon, a DDS, a certificate), then origins rationally under-invest. They buy the cheapest paper that meets the regulations; the fieldwork doesn’t improve, and the infrastructure does not improve. If, instead, buyers pay for the performance that good infrastructure enables (verified regenerative practices, resilient yields, traceable farmer income outcomes), then the origin’s investment case changes. The same traceability spend that satisfies Brussels starts to generate commercial returns for the decade that follows.
That is the question he was putting to the room.
The operational burden: what the numbers confirm
Alejandro’s argument is easier to accept when you look at the underlying producer data.
Start with the systems side. 45% of producers still rely primarily on paper records or basic spreadsheets. Only 14% are on fully digital solutions. 17% use partial digital systems. 17% have real-time digital traceability. These are not fringe numbers in a regulated industry moving toward digital product passports; they are the dominant operating reality at the first mile.
Now add the registry-versus-geotagging gap. 59% of producers report that all their farmers are registered with unique IDs. Good. But when the same producers are asked what share of those farms have actually been geotagged with GPS coordinates or polygon boundaries, 28% report 0% coverage, and another 24% report less than 25% coverage. So, more than half the producer sample has a registry, but it is nowhere near full spatial coverage. Having the farmers on a list is one thing. Having the polygons Brussels wants is a different thing entirely, and that gap is the operational burden in numerical form.
Layer the EUDR readiness gap on top. Among producers, 22% describe themselves as fully prepared and 26% as near-ready, so 48% are substantially on track. But 22% are still in progress, 17% are at early stages, and 9% are not at all prepared. That is a sample in which nearly half of the origin is ready, and nearly half is not. And the blocker, across that sample, is overwhelmingly cost: 59% cite high compliance costs as a top-three industry challenge, with stakeholder collaboration gaps tied for first at 59%.
Alejandro’s position, read against this data, is not a complaint. It is a description.
Where the producer sample says it’s going: the regenerative pivot
If the operational picture is strained, the forward-looking picture is not. It is, in fact, the single most striking finding in the producer dataset.
When producer respondents were asked where they plan to focus their traceability and sustainability investment over the next one to two years, 76% named “implement regenerative farming projects” as a priority, the highest-scoring answer in the producer forecast. Not EUDR. Not certification. Not paperwork. Regenerative.
The adjacent priorities reinforce it. 66% plan to upgrade digital systems. 66% plan to collaborate with buyers on transparency initiatives. 59% plan to expand traceability to more farmers and more fields. And on current initiatives (what producers are doing right now, not just planning), 66% are already engaged in regenerative agriculture practices, 52% in first-mile digital data capture, and 52% in legality documentation.
Read these numbers in order, and the logic is clean. The producer segment has spent the EUDR cycle building a digital first-mile layer it didn’t have. That layer has to be paid for. The only way it gets paid for, structurally, is if it runs multiple workflows. So producers are now laying out regenerative programs, farmer income initiatives, and transparency collaborations on top of the same foundation they built for compliance.
This is the “compliance to regeneration” arc that the LatAm panel was describing in Amsterdam. It is not aspirational. It is what the producer sample says it is doing.
CNCH in Colombia: the case in operational form
To see the arc in a specific operation, look at what Alejandro’s own organization is running.
CNCH’s Programa de Trazabilidad Cacao Desarrollo (PTCD), launched in May 2024, now covers more than 4,500 cocoa farmers across 70 associations in Colombia’s key cocoa regions, with a stated target of 5,500 farmers by the end of 2026. But PTCD is not an EUDR project with a sustainability label bolted on. It is a development platform whose architecture generates EUDR-compliant data as one of several outputs.
The same digital system that captures farm polygons and deforestation status also runs CNCH’s Human Rights Monitoring and Remediation surveys, tracks agronomic interventions, supports premium-pricing logic for participating associations, and feeds into longer-term climate and regenerative planning. The polygon is not the product. The infrastructure is the product. The polygon is what the infrastructure generates when Brussels asks for it.
This is what “commercially anchored traceability” looks like in practice. And it is exactly the architecture Alejandro was pointing to in Amsterdam when he asked who pays for what comes next.
The LatAm lesson for the global industry
Read the Barometer against CNCH, and a clear thesis emerges — one that applies well beyond Colombia, and well beyond cocoa.
The LatAm producer sample is telling the industry three things in a single dataset. First: the traceability infrastructure that the industry has invested in building for EUDR is valuable only if it is reused. Paying for paperwork once is a cost. Paying for infrastructure that generates paperwork, agronomy, regenerative data, and farmer income insights is an asset. Second: the 76% signal on regenerative is not opportunistic. It is a rational response after finally building the digital foundation. The next decade of LatAm cocoa and coffee will be regenerative because the digital layer now exists to measure it. Third: the commercial model has to catch up. As long as 69% of producers are citing cost as the blocker, the industry is paying too little for the infrastructure it says it wants.
Where this leaves the industry
For LatAm origins and cooperatives, the implication is direct. The digital stack you build for EUDR in 2026 is the stack you will run your business on for the next decade. Build it digital-first, build it modular, and build it against a commercial conversation with your buyers, not against a customs deadline. Under-invest now, and you will pay again in 2027, 2028, and every time a new regulation or customer program arrives.
For downstream buyers, brands, and processors sourcing from LatAm, the implications are sharper. Your origin partners are ready to move from defense to offense. The 76% regenerative signal is sitting right next to the 69% cost blocker. The gap between those two numbers is the commercial space the next generation of sourcing agreements will have to fill.
For everyone else in the industry reading this from the sidelines: the LatAm picture in the 2026 Traceability Barometer is not a regional footnote. It is a preview of where cocoa and coffee sustainability go when the compliance dust settles, and operators look up from their due diligence statements.
Alejandro asked in Amsterdam who pays for that future. The Barometer suggests the answer is already being worked out in the field. The question is how quickly the commercial model follows.
The 2026 Farmforce Traceability Barometer is a Farmforce industry report based on an anonymous online survey conducted by NielsenIQ between November 2025 and January 2026, with 76 cocoa and coffee supply chain respondents. It captures directional industry trends rather than peer-reviewed absolute data — but the patterns it surfaces align with what operators across the sector are already doing in the field.
