Webinar insights: Innovations for inclusion towards the European Union Deforestation Regulation

This internal webinar from the Honduras team of the CGIAR 'Rethinking Food Markets' Initiative presented the portfolio of innovations developed by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT in agricultural product traceability for compliance with international regulations.

The Honduran team consists of researchers from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT: Federico Ceballos-Sierra, postdoctoral researcher; Mirian Colindres, Senior Research Associate; Byron Reyes, scientist; and Jenny Wiegel, scientist and Regional Coordinator for Central America.

The following tools were presented:

• DIASCA, an open access platform to facilitate interoperability between traceability solutions, whose working group is led by Brian King, leader of the CGIAR Digital Accelerator and Data Innovation
• Terra-i+, a tool designed for the visualization of land cover and land use change detections, whose working group is led by Dr. Louis Reymondin, leader of the CGIAR Digital Accelerator and Data Innovation
• CROPPIE, a tool that allows smallholder farmers to generate yield predictions with smartphone photos supported by Artificial Intelligence, whose working group is led by Dr. Christian Bunn, Climate Action Scientist II.

A panel of experts presented their insights on the relevance of the tools and the feasibility of implementing them in Honduras. This included Fernando Cáceres - project manager of the European Commission; Pablo Ruiz - director for Latin America of the Hanns R. Neuman Foundation, and Néstor Meneses - deputy technical director of the Honduran Coffee Institute.

Key take-aways from the webinar

• Recognize the risk of exclusion posed by the implementation of due diligence regulations for deforestation, human rights, and living income. This risk can be particularly high for small producers in remote areas and with fragile links to the value chain, who may see their commercial activity threatened if they are not able to comply with the requirements of these regulations.
• Identify a set of public interest assets that are necessary for the efficient implementation of traceability schemes. Specific elements such as farm coordinates and polygons and unique producer identifiers were proposed, without neglecting the importance of common monitoring, reporting and evaluation methodologies. The provision of these goods can be threatened by the lack of coordination between public and private institutions.
• Highlight the need for the creation of tools with local actors to incorporate the nuances of each geography. Likewise, prioritize the joint implementation of the tools with these local actors to build local technical and organizational capacity as a necessary condition for the sustainability of the systems over time.
• Promote interoperability and complementarity among the tools. In terms of interoperability, this objective is recognized as a necessary condition to facilitate the inclusion of marginalized farmers. Likewise, work must be done on the complementarity of monitoring, reporting and verification tools, favoring the completeness and consistency of the information generated by traceability systems.

• Federico Ceballos-Sierra is a postdoctoral researcher of the Bioversity International Alliance and CIAT.
• Mirian Colindres is a Senior Research Associate of the Bioversity International Alliance and CIAT.
• Byron Reyes is a scientist with the Bioversity International Alliance and CIAT.
• Jenny Wiegel is a scientist and Regional Coordinator for Central America of the Bioversity International Alliance and CIAT.