Who owns Africa’s agricultural data in the age of EUDR?

As EU rules tighten, EAC–SADC leaders should push for state-led traceability and regional compliance mechanisms

COMMENT | JANE NALUNGA | The global trade architecture is currently undergoing a shift to one increasingly defined by stringent sustainability mandates and digital traceability requirements. This transition is most visible in the emergence of the European Union (EU) Green Deal, which includes the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), a policy instrument that mandates verifiable evidence that commodities entering the EU market, including coffee, cocoa, soy, palm oil, cattle, rubber, and wood, are not linked to deforestation occurring after December 31, 2020.

For the member states of the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the EUDR represents both a significant threat to market access and a catalyst for reimagining the governance of agricultural data. The high-level dialogue recently convened by SEATINI highlighted a critical consensus: the geography of compliance is the new frontier of international trade and within this frontier, the collection, management, storage and sovereignty of data are critical.

The EUDR introduces a rigorous data governance framework that requires operators to provide precise geolocation coordinates for every plot of land where these relevant commodities are produced, and products lacking this data are prohibited from entering the EU market.

For plots of land exceeding four (4) hectares, the regulation specifies the use of polygons (latitude and longitude coordinates with at least six (6) decimal places) that accurately define the perimeter of the production area.  For smaller plots, a single point of latitude and longitude may suffice, yet the burden of precision remains high, which creates an immediate data collection challenge in the EAC and SADC regions, where the agricultural sector is dominated by smallholder farmers.

To achieve compliance, every batch of commodities must be linked to a Due Diligence Statement (DDS) submitted through the EU’s TRACES system, a process that necessitates a comprehensive digital transformation of supplier onboarding and mapping.

The cost of establishing these data systems is significant, and for smallholder farmers, the unit cost of compliance is disproportionately high relative to their output, leading to the potential exclusion of small producers who cannot amortize these costs across larger volumes.

One of the most profound issues raised during the SEATINI EAC-SADC dialogue was concerns about ownership and control of farm-level data. In the absence of state-led registries, private companies have increasingly filled the void, with Uganda having private firms like ASIGMA and Pula entering the market to map farms and gather GPS coordinates and farmer identities.

This has led to a situation where sensitive information is stored in external clouds, effectively disenfranchising the original data subjects. One of the issues highlighted at the high-level dialogue was that for farmers to access this data to prove compliance to other international partners, such as those in Asia or the Americas, they are often required to go through a paywall to access their own information. This risk of data abuse extends beyond simple economic rent-seeking.

In a data-driven society, the concentration of massive datasets in the hands of a few private entities creates a significant power imbalance. For marginalized groups, the lack of robust data protection frameworks poses a risk of exploitation.

The SADC region has established model laws on data protection, yet gaps remain in addressing the specific vulnerabilities inherent in agricultural data processing. Data sovereignty must therefore be prioritized as a strategic defense against extractive traceability models, where information is harvested from the Global South to satisfy the regulatory appetites of the Global North without providing local value.

A transformative traceability model, by contrast, ensures that producers have control and ownership over their data, using it as an asset to improve their bargaining power and access to other markets and finance. And to achieve this, there is a necessity of state intervention to address coordination failures in registration and compliance.

Markets alone are insufficient to deliver the structural transformation required for compliance; the state must lead in providing public platforms for standards, storage and digital utilities, most especially for the MSMEs, which account for approximately 85% of agrifood value chain volumes in Africa.

State-led initiatives, such as the unified national traceability systems being developed in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana for the cocoa sector, demonstrate the potential for government-run platforms to reduce the fragmentation of data systems.

Currently, data duplication is a major inefficiency.  For example, it is estimated that more than 20% of farm polygons registered by certification bodies in some regions are mapped multiple times, leading to confusion and increasing the risk of fraud. A single public dataset could provide a backbone for multiple traceability systems, allowing for the cross-checking of supply chains and increasing the overall credibility of sustainability claims.

Regional coordination between the EAC and SADC is also equally vital under platforms like the Tripartite Free Trade Area, which offer a platform for harmonizing standards and moving as a single block in negotiations with external trading partners. By establishing compliance corridors, or designated regional routes where farm registries, laboratories, and storage facilities are integrated into a single compliance framework, the region can reduce duplicative retesting costs and transform these corridors into recognized brand assets.  In addition to this, the domestication of the African Union (AU) Data Policy Framework, which advocates for the harmonization of digital data governance across the continent while safeguarding human rights and ensuring equitable access, is important.

By distinguishing between data sovereignty (the right of states to govern their data) and broad data localization (which can stifle trade), the framework encourages the creation of a consolidated data environment that supports the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), as well as the development of national Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategies that will play a crucial role in ensuring that African countries can self-manage their data and minimize the risks associated with automated processing and algorithmic bias. By taking ownership of their data and industrializing their processing, African nations can move to being active owners of high-value, traceable, and sustainable global value chains.

*****

Jane Nalunga is the Executive Director of the Southern and Eastern Africa Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI)