Brazil grows more coffee than any other country, roughly a third of world supply, and it is the largest single origin for EU roasters. If Brazilian green coffee is in your book, this page covers what changes relative to the general coffee guide: the risk tier, the unusual amount of geodata that already exists, and the screening picture in each producing region.
Risk tier: standard, with a 3% inspection target
Brazil is not listed in the Commission's benchmarking annex, so it defaults to standard risk. That means the full due diligence cycle applies: information collection under Article 9, a documented risk assessment under Article 10, and mitigation where risk is more than negligible. Authorities must check at least 3% of operators sourcing from standard-risk countries each year. There is no simplified track for Brazilian coffee, whatever certification it carries.
The CAR registry: a head start most origins lack
Brazil requires rural properties to register in the CAR (Cadastro Ambiental Rural), a national environmental registry that stores each property's boundary as a polygon. Coverage across coffee country is close to universal, which means your supplier usually does not need to survey anything: the geometry already exists and can be exported per farm. Two cautions. CAR is self-declared, so boundaries can be optimistic or stale, and a CAR record covers the whole property while EUDR wants the production plots. A 300-hectare fazenda with 80 hectares under coffee should ideally declare the coffee blocks, not the entire holding, though declaring the full property is accepted and common. Validate CAR exports like any other file: reprojection, ring closure and duplicate vertices are the usual defects.
Farm structure: polygons more often than points
Unlike Colombia or Ethiopia, Brazilian coffee includes many holdings well above the 4-hectare threshold, especially in the Cerrado Mineiro and western Bahia, where irrigated farms run to hundreds of hectares. Those plots must be polygons, not points. The Sul de Minas region still has tens of thousands of family farms under 4 hectares that can file as points. A typical container aggregated by a cooperative will mix both, and large cooperatives (the biggest in the world are Brazilian) have been assembling exactly these plot files for their EU buyers since 2024. Ask for the file per lot; it usually exists.
Screening by region
Most Brazilian coffee grows far from the active deforestation frontier. Minas Gerais, São Paulo and Espírito Santo were cleared generations ago, so plots there rarely show post-2020 forest loss and screening against the 31 December 2020 cutoff is usually quick. The regions that deserve attention are the expansion zones: new plantings in western Bahia and parts of the Cerrado Mineiro sit closer to native vegetation, and Rondônia's robusta belt borders the Amazon arc of deforestation. A flag there is not a verdict, it is a request for evidence: planting records, prior imagery, and the land-use history of the specific block. The same Cerrado classification questions that complicate Brazilian soy apply to coffee planted on former savanna woodland.
Legality is part of the test
EUDR requires production in accordance with Brazilian law, and Brazil's Forest Code is unusually demanding: properties must maintain a legal reserve (20% of the property in the Cerrado, more in the Amazon biome) and protect riparian zones. A CAR record flagged as pending or overlapping an embargoed area is a legality signal your risk assessment has to address, even when the coffee blocks themselves are old. IBAMA's public embargo list is checkable by coordinates and belongs in your evidence trail.
What to ask a Brazilian supplier
- The plot file per contracted lot: CAR-derived polygons for large farms, points for sub-4-hectare holdings, in GeoJSON or shapefile.
- The CAR registration number per property, so you can cross-check status independently.
- Production dates for the harvest that fills your lot.
- Whether the exporter or cooperative has already screened the plots and will share results, which you verify rather than adopt.
Then screen the file yourself, resolve any flags while the coffee is still at origin, and file the DDS in TRACES with the plot file attached. For contrast, see how the same commodity behaves in Colombia, where half a million smallholders change the data problem entirely, or Vietnam, where a low-risk classification changes the procedure.