The Great Britain Deforestation Regulation (GBDR) is advancing through the UK legislative process. With enforcement anticipated from 2027 and a £1 million global turnover threshold, it will catch most businesses that import forest-risk commodities — including specialty coffee and cacao — from Latin America.
The documentation standard closely mirrors the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). If your suppliers have already gone through EUDR compliance, they're largely ready for GBDR. If they haven't, you have a 12–18 month window to get ahead of the enforcement curve.
What GBDR will require from your supply chain
Based on the EUDR precedent, suppliers will need to demonstrate:
- Polygon-level geolocation of production plots — not just GPS points, but boundaries
- Deforestation verification against a December 2020 cutoff date using satellite data
- Chain of custody documentation from farm to export lot
- Auditable due diligence statements (DDS) per lot exported
The technical verification standard for Peru is well-established under EUDR. The same evidence package covers GBDR.
The Peru coffee supply chain — what's actually happening
Peru is the world's 10th largest coffee producer, with approximately 225,000 smallholder families growing coffee across Cajamarca, San Martín, Junín, and Amazonas. The supply chain typically runs: smallholder producer → cooperative → exporter → UK importer/roaster.
The challenge for GBDR compliance sits at the cooperative level: most cooperatives have their members' plots recorded as GPS points — or just village names — not as geospatial polygons. The polygon-level geolocation work needs to happen at cooperative level, not at individual farm level. For a cooperative with 500 members and 1,200 plots, this sounds daunting. With the right tooling, it's achievable in 2–4 weeks.
How to assess your supplier's readiness — three questions
1. "Do you have polygon-level GPS boundaries for all your member producers' plots?"
If the answer is "we have GPS points" or "we have addresses," they are not yet EUDR/GBDR compliant. A GPS point on the edge of a plot can give a false deforestation result if fragments of cleared land exist within the polygon.
2. "Have you run a satellite deforestation check on those plots against December 2020?"
This requires crossing polygon data against Global Forest Change (Hansen/GFC) or equivalent satellite layers. It cannot be done manually or from a spreadsheet.
3. "Can you export a DDS per lot with the geospatial evidence attached?"
The due diligence statement should include plot coordinates, deforestation percentage, satellite source, and lot-level aggregation — not just a declaration of intent.
What Terralyr does
Terralyr is a geospatial intelligence platform built specifically for the Latin American forest-risk commodity supply chain. It automates exactly the three steps above:
- Cooperative uploads member plot data (CSV, GeoJSON, or KML)
- Terralyr crosses each polygon against GFC2020 + DeepMind ForTy satellite layers in seconds
- Terralyr generates a DDS per lot, exportable to PDF with a QR-linked buyer verification portal
For UK importers, the buyer portal means you can verify your supplier's DDS in real time — before the shipment arrives — without requesting documents by email. You get a direct link per lot, auditable and timestamped.
The window is now
Suppliers that complete the geolocation and verification work today will have clean documentation when GBDR enforcement starts. Those who wait until 2027 will be scrambling — and you'll be negotiating with a supplier who can't prove compliance while your competitors have already switched to verified sources.
The Peruvian coffee cooperatives that are EUDR-compliant today took 3–6 months to get there. Start that conversation with your suppliers now.