Tracing commodities to source takes tech – and old-fashioned sleuthing

Did you know that an ox’s fingerprint is on its snout? A new Brazil-based start-up, Databoi, has created a smartphone app that generates a unique digital identity for every head of cattle based on a photo of their muzzle. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, the app allows you to add details on the weight, breed, health and origin of each cow or bull in the herd.

As innovation gathers pace, the number of new cattle-tracing apps is growing. They help farmers increase the productivity of their herds. They also help traders, importers and consumers to trace the origin of beef and dairy products back to the land where the animals were raised. Next year, this kind of tracing is set to become a legal requirement under the European Union’s upcoming regulation on deforestation-free products.

On 13 September 2022, the European Parliament approved the new regulation, which makes it the responsibility of importers to guarantee that commodities imported into the bloc have not been produced on recently deforested land. The commodities include cattle, soy, palm oil, cocoa, coffee, wood, leather, rubber, maize, pork and poultry. The European Parliament even strengthened the regulation to cover not just tropical forests but other woodlands, such as Brazil’s enormous Cerrado biome. But to make the regulation work, tracing the commodities back to source is vital.

The challenges around traceability are complex and differ by commodity. The good news is that the EU’s impending regulation is already sparking tech innovations and public-private partnerships to tackle the problem. Satellite technology has a vital role to play in tracking deforestation, but until recently the imagery across large areas of landmass was low resolution and infrequently updated. This is now changing, thanks in part to Norway’s Ministry of Climate and Environment, which in September 2020 selected three geospatial organizations to provide universal access to high-resolution satellite monitoring (sub-5m² per pixel), with the aim of protecting tropical forests and providing sustainable livelihoods for forest communities.

One of the project partners, Planet, has developed base-maps of 64 developing countries across the tropics, updated monthly and freely available for anyone to view. Planet’s Claire Bentley told Perspectives that consumer goods giant Unilever is testing the use of Planet’s maps “to validate and verify deforestation alerts in key palm-oil sourcing regions, enabling their team to engage suppliers and act early on deforestation risks”. The ability of Planet to provide high-resolution mapping updated every month makes it possible to monitor deforestation in near-real time.

Getting high-resolution satellite imagery is only first base in tracing commodities back to source. How do you know whether the soy or beef you buy actually comes from that patch of pale-yellow deforested ground photographed from space? “The logistics of tracing every grain of soy or every ox the final mile back to its source is very complex – and it’s different for each commodity,” says Felipe Carazo, head of public sector engagement at the Tropical Forest Alliance.

Take cocoa or coffee. These commodities have linear transaction dynamics (for example, organized producer participation trading through farmers’ cooperatives), which makes tracing them a little easier to tackle. But soy is a different challenge entirely. “It’s a mass-balance commodity where many crops get mixed up in the milling factories,” explains Carazo, who says it could take years to turn the sector towards a specific-product approach. Cattle are complicated too. Though you can trace individual animals while they are on your farm, oxen get traded and mixed up many times during their lifespan. “You’ll have one farm for calves, another to fatten them up, a separate farm for bulls and so on, all under very informal conditions,” says Carazo, “It’s really complicated.”

One organization providing some answers is AidEnvironment, a non-profit that combines cutting-edge satellite-based technology with old-school on-the-ground sleuthing to build up a picture of which producers, traders and buyers could be behind the commodities driving tropical deforestation. In April 2022, AidEnvironment published its second Real-time Deforestation Monitoring (RDM) report that presents eight cases from Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado biomes linking recent deforestation to soy traders’ and beef processors’ supply chains.

AidEnvironment’s methodology starts with deforestation and fire alert data from various sources, including INPE, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, which they confirm through satellite images provided by Planet and others. They then trace land ownership via federal land tenure databases and, within each land holding, analyze which areas have mandatory conservation status. For example, under Brazil’s Forest Code, 80% of private property within the Amazonia biome cannot be deforested, while for the Cerrado biome the figure is 35%. Once the ownership of a property is clearly linked to an individual, the organization uses various databases to establish a list of registered companies, traders, processors and buyers with relationships to that piece of land or that owner. Depending on the quality of the data, AidEnvironment awards a low, medium or high level of certainty around the attribution of the links between deforestation and specific soy traders and beef processors.

Carazo sounds a note of caution on the global North putting too much pressure on countries like Brazil to stop deforestation, without also providing resources to help emerging economies and forest communities to address the problem themselves. He is concerned that the cost of proving commodities as deforestation-free will simply get passed up the supply chain from consumers to importers to traders and ultimately to the farmers themselves – many of whom cannot afford such additional costs. Carazo takes comfort from the recent EU Parliament’s vote on the deforestation regulation, which referenced the need for “producer partnerships” through which the EU could develop support for research and development programmes for commodity producers, via financial incentives, resources and capacity-building.

There is also an issue of sovereignty. “It’s important for Brazilian data collection to be validated within Brazil’s own legal framework,” says Carazo. Think back to the long, hot summer of 2019 which broke new records for fires in the Amazon. In July that year, Brazil’s populist president Jair Bolsonaro lashed out at his critics from the global North by saying: “No country in the world has the moral right to talk about the Amazon. You destroyed your own ecosystems.”

Effective producer partnerships between, for example, the EU and Brazil, could provide a shared, transparent and high-quality platform for developing new tracing technologies, building trust and validating the data, argues Carazo. “There’s an opportunity for innovative technology to be developed from the bottom up, not just from the North,” he says. He points to the Cerrado Deforestation Alert System, a satellite-based system launched in September 2022 by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), which uses a combination of artificial intelligence and imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite to track deforestation in the Cerrado, the most biodiverse savanna in the world. André Guimarães, IPAM’s executive director, told Perspectives that the alert system has already detected enormous increases in deforestation in Matopiba, a region “where 60% of deforestation in the Cerrado is taking place”.

“Let’s not develop these technologies separately”, says Carazo. “Imagine if we had IPAM connected to the forthcoming EU Observatory on Deforestation and Forest Degradation. We could have researchers in Brussels crunching source data from Brazil. Now that really would be innovative.”

The following is a list of innovative digital technologies and organizations we came across during our research that are tracing tropical deforestation. Note, this is small sample of what’s out there and we are not endorsing any particular company.

AidEnvironment – provides actionable data to eliminate commodity-driven deforestation, through analyzing millions of data points on land use, land ownership, supply chains, corporate ownership structures and finance flows, supplemented by satellite technology and on-the-ground investigations.

Chipsafer – tracks the behaviour and location of cattle using a self-recharging collar linked to a software platform, with the aim of improving animal health and productivity while reducing environmental impact.

Chloris Geospatial – uses remote sensing, machine learning and ecological science to directly measure forest degradation, regrowth and the resulting net gains and losses in carbon stock.

Conecta – Partnerships for Responsible Agriculture – aims to increase transparency in the Brazilian beef supply chain, using satellite monitoring and blockchain technology to verify illegal deforestation and other social and environmental issues.

Databoi – generates a unique digital identity for every head of cattle, using an app powered by AI and blockchain that enables you to add details on weight, breed, health and origin of each cow or bull.

IPAM’s Cerrado Deforestation Alert System – uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to map deforestation down to 10m² resolution in the Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savanna.

LandGriffon – aims to make supply chains more sustainable by building a complete picture using geolocation, scientific data from leading researchers and probabilistic models where products cannot be traced to source.

Planet – uses satellite imagery and machine learning to create maps that track deforestation and levels of carbon stocks and emissions, on a monthly basis down to 5m² resolution.

Space Intelligence – produces detailed land-cover maps using satellite data combined with geolocated social media images enhance with machine learning, to support nature-based solutions.

Trase – takes a supply-chain mapping approach that brings together disparate, publicly available data to connect consumer markets to deforestation and other impacts on the ground.

• This article is a part of TFA Perspectives, which features many similar stories about commodity supply chains. Read them here.