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Smallholder traceability data collected for EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) compliance can do more than satisfy regulators. Brought together in one platform, it can help palm oil companies forecast supply, shape sourcing strategy and work with farmers on resilience, while keeping smallholders inside compliant supply chains.
Why does smallholder visibility matter for palm oil supply security?
Smallholders make up around 40% of Indonesia's palm oil supply. Yet they remain the least visible part of the supply base. Fresh fruit bunches (FFB) often pass through agents and other intermediaries before they reach a mill, so buyers have limited sight of where the fruit was grown.
That gap matters for more than compliance. When companies have the right intelligence about their smallholder supply base, they can predict when supply may become an issue. Replanting is one example: when ageing palms are cut down and replaced, those farms produce less for several years.
From compliance data to one picture of the supply base
Many companies have already invested in traceability to meet the EUDR, No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation (NDPE) commitments and the expectations of financiers. The result is often fragmented: several data providers, inconsistent formats, and datasets held for compliance reporting rather than used for commercial decisions.
The opportunity now is to turn that effort into business insight. Brought together in one platform, the same first-mile data that satisfies a regulator can also inform sourcing strategy, supply forecasting and supplier engagement. It can also reduce sourcing risk while keeping smallholders inside compliant supply chains, rather than pushing them out.
Aligning buyers and farmers on resilience
Meridia's first-mile intelligence work with oil palm smallholder farms in Indonesia shows how this works in practice. Learn more about Unilever’s Smallholder Hub Programme.
First-mile intelligence gives buyers and farmers a shared, factual picture of conditions at farm level. That common ground helps them agree on resilience measures that work for both sides:
- For buyers: security of sustainable supply.
- For farmers: security of income.
Compliance data stops being a one-way reporting requirement and becomes a basis for working together on the long-term health of the supply base.
How does including smallholders increase deforestation-free volume?
A supply shed is a defined sourcing area around a facility such as a mill. Instead of a generic radius around the mill, Meridia's Supply Shed Modelling combines production, asset and spatial data to model which areas logically supply it. Including the smallholder farms in the supply shed around one mill increases the deforestation-free volume from that mill. Smallholders become part of the verified supply instead of an unknown.
Why combine landscape and plot-level data?
Plot-level data shows whether an individual farm is compliant. Buyers also need to understand the wider deforestation and conversion dynamics in the landscapes they source from. WRI Indonesia advocates a landscape approach that connects landscape intelligence, such as forest and peatland cover, protected areas and land-cover change, with verified farm-level data, rather than relying on either source alone.
WRI also makes the case for a shared, trusted smallholder data ecosystem. Core data such as farmer identity, plot location and legality is collected once, validated against common standards and reused, so that each buyer does not have to build its own smallholder database. This lowers compliance costs and makes smallholder registration a way to include farmers, not only a compliance requirement.
Next steps
Companies across the palm oil value chain already hold much of the first-mile data they need. The next step is to use it for decisions on sourcing, supply forecasting and resilience, not only for reporting.
If you would like to discuss how first-mile intelligence could support your own palm oil supply chain, get in touch with the Meridia team.
