Addressing global environmental and social challenges in agricultural supply chains is complex, requires a combination of innovative and effective approaches and tools, and must include all actors from producers to consumers.  Market policy and regulations are critical tools to respond to these challenges as they can create a pre-competitive level playing field to work at the scale required to meet global objectives (i.e. national, regional and sector level). However, companies who are the ones that are targeted by these regulations should not pass on all efforts to upstream actors in the value chains.  Responsibilities must be equitably shared by all actors or the process will not be sustainable.  One essential element to do this effectively is by exchanging information, tools and strategies and creating an open dialogue across the sector to discuss and jointly overcome constraints to effective implementation and compliance.

Currently the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) needs to be applied in seven commodity sectors including coffee and will soon be followed by due diligence regulations which include more socially focused issues such as living wage and living income.  It appears that other importing countries as well as producing countries will adopt similar regulations as the common global challenges of climate change, natural resource and biodiversity conservation, economically driven immigration, social unrest, and threats to production and supply increase. Therefore now is the time for collective action to develop mechanisms to achieve the objectives of the regulations while identifying and avoiding potential negative impacts.

To respond to this situation in the ASEAN coffee sector, ACF is collaborating with key groups and stakeholders to initiate the ASEAN Learning Community on Market Policy.  This builds on the ASEAN EU Coffee Summit organized by ACF and the International Coffee Organization’s Coffee Private Public Task Force (ICO-CPPTF) held in May 2024 in Kuala Lumpur, where the need to provide information to understand and comply with EUDR, and subsequent regulations, was identified, and the ACF board confirmed its commitment to facilitate information and the creation of a two-way dialogue for its members and other stakeholders in the region with other regional and international actors.  Therefore, in February 2026, ACF initiated the ASEAN Learning Community on Market Policy through a collaboration with the CPPTF, Team Europe Initiative (TEI) with two of its flagship projects GIZ SAFE project and EUDR Engagement project, European Coffee Federation (ECF), and the Committee on Sustainability Assessment (COSA).

The first step was a webinar to provide an update on the status of the EUDR and share tools that have been developed for the region and globally.  The webinar report, a summary of responses to a questionnaire on needs circulated to stakeholders for the webinar, as well as several critical tools are now available below on ACF’s regional knowledge hub.  These will be updated over time.  As well, ACF has built a constructive engagement with other regional coffee platforms (Promecafé in MesoAmerica, the African Fine Coffee Association and the Inter African Coffee Organization).   These platforms have already established learning communities on market policies for their regions, and this will be a valuable opportunity to share tools, learnings and experiences across the regions as well as with the ICO membership.

We look forward to you reviewing and most importantly using the information and tools provided here.  We also hope you will share your recommendations on how to improve this process and what are critical issues that should be included in the dialogue related to market policies and any tools and/or approaches you would recommend - for the ASEAN region, between the regional platforms and at the sector level with collaborators like the webinar organizers ACF, CPPTF, GIZ-SAFE, TEI, ECF and COSA.

In preparation for the February 2025 webinar, a questionnaire was shared with participants to identify information needs, concerns and recommendations. The following is a summary of the responses to that questionanaire: