By Jackson Okata
NYERI, Kenya, Jan 21 2026 – For the last twenty years, Sarah Nyaga, a smallholder farmer from Embu County in central Kenya, has farmed coffee. Like most across Kenya, she relies on the export market. A greater percentage of Kenya’s coffee ends up within the European Union market, but a new law threatens to disrupt what has been a source of income for thousands of farmers like Nyaga.

As the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) takes effect, smallholder coffee farmers in Kenya face an existential threat. EUDR is a new law adopted by the European Union to prevent the import and sale of products linked to deforestation and forest degradation. It targets seven key products, among them cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soy, timber, and rubber.

And even though smallholders like Nyaga have an extra six months to comply with EUDR, many are not aware of its existence.

Farmers are in rural areas, and many have no access to the internet. They rely on vernacular media houses for information, and many have never heard of EUDR. Government and cooperative society officials who have been tasked with breaking it down have done very little,’’ said Nyaga.

Peter Maina, a farmer in Nyeri county, says, “The EUDR language is too technical for an illiterate farmer to understand.”

“The only people who seem to understand EUDR are Ministry of Agriculture officials in Nairobi. For the ordinary farmer, it is business as usual, and many do not understand the implications of not complying with these regulations,” said Maina.

Tech Challenges

Across Kenya’s coffee-growing zones, farmers, cooperative societies, and coffee exporters fear losing the EU market for failure to comply with the EUDR policy. According to George Watene from the Global Coffee Platform, insufficient access to infrastructure and technical support is a significant barrier to EUDR compliance for many farmers.

“Farmers have limited access to essential information and communication technology (ICT) resources, such as reliable internet and suitable digital tools like smartphones. This undermines the ability to implement traceability systems effectively,” said Watene.

Watene says most coffee farmers are faced with logistical and technical difficulties posed by the requirement for detailed geolocation mapping, particularly polygon mapping.

“This requirement is challenging to meet not only for smallholder farmers but also for cooperatives and estates that may lack the necessary resources and technical capabilities, he said.

Coffee exporters are required to file a due diligence statement declaring that their product is deforestation-free, which means farmers must provide some personal data to help traders complete this statement. Some farmers are worried about the safety of their data.

EUDR requires farmers to provide exact GPS coordinates for their coffee farms. This allows EU regulators to check satellite images and determine whether deforestation or land degradation occurred.

“Sharing data is essential for EUDR compliance and maintaining EU market access, but data must be collected and used responsibly, with safeguards to prevent misuse and protect farmer rights,” Watene said.

Revenue Loss Risk

Bruno Linyuri, Director General of Kenya’s Agriculture and Food Authority, says that so far only 30 percent of the national coffee farms have been geo-mapped in 16 out of the 33 coffee-growing regions of Kenya. This means that only 32,688 Ha out of the 109,384 Ha of coffee plantations have met the EUDR regulations.

Felix Mutwiri, head of Kenya’s coffee Directorate, told IPS that a multi-agency team on compliance had been set up to ensure compliance. He said that Kenya is keen on remaining a leading exporter of coffee to the EU Market.

“The government has already developed a concept for implementing the regulations. To help farmers comply, we have rolled out Geolocation mapping drives and training on EUDR requirements for smallholder farmers,” said Mutwiri.

Smallholder farmers produce approximately 70 percent of Kenya’s coffee. There are an estimated 800,000 small-scale coffee growers and over 2,500 coffee estates operating under some 500 cooperatives.

With an estimated 1.5 million household employees, Kenya’s coffee sector constitutes 30 percent of agricultural labor. The Kenyan coffee market is projected to reach USD 2.4 billion by 2033. Kenya could lose an estimated KES 90 billion (USD 695 m) in export earnings over five years for EUDR non-compliance.

According to Linyuri, the EU buys 60 percent of Kenya’s coffee exports. In 2024, Kenya exported 53,519 tons of coffee with an estimated value of KES 38.4 billion (USD 296.8m). In 2025, the country’s coffee production rose by 13% to 850,000 bags (51,000 tons), with exports increasing by 10% to 840,000 bags (50,400 tons).

Linyuri says the EUDR is not only about coffee and other products, but also about protecting the environment

“We have a problem of people clearing forests to plant coffee and other crops, and this policy will help us address this,’’ said Linyuri.

He added, “If we keep on destroying the environment through deforestation, there will come a time when farmers will have nowhere to farm because our land will be a desert. EUDR is here to help us dignify farming while protecting our environment.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 21 2026 – The world is already in the state of “water bankruptcy”. In many basins and aquifers, long-term overuse and degradation mean that past hydrological and ecological baselines cannot realistically be restored.

While not every basin or country is water-bankrupt, enough critical systems around the world have crossed these thresholds, and are interconnected through trade, migration, climate feedbacks, and geopolitical dependencies, that the global risk landscape is now fundamentally altered.

The familiar language of “water stress” and “water crisis” is no longer adequate. Stress describes high pressure that is still reversible. Crisis describes acute, time-bound shocks. Water bankruptcy must be recognized as a distinct post-crisis state, where accumulated damage and overshoot have undermined the system’s capacity to recover.

A group of women fetching water from a dam in Taha, Northern Region of Ghana. Credit: Evans Ahorsu. Source: UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health

Water bankruptcy management must address insolvency and irreversibility. Unlike financial bankruptcy management, which deals only with insolvency, managing water bankruptcy is concerned with rebalancing demand and supply under conditions where returning to baseline conditions is no longer possible.

Anthropogenic drought is central to the world’s new water reality. Drought and water shortage are increasingly driven by human activities, over-allocation, groundwater depletion, land and soil degradation, deforestation, pollution, and climate change, rather than natural variability alone. Water bankruptcy is the outcome of long-term anthropogenic drought, not just bad luck with hydrological anomalies.

Water bankruptcy is about both quantity and quality. Declining stocks, polluted rivers, and degrading aquifers, and salinized soils mean that the truly usable fraction of available water is shrinking, even where total volumes may appear stable.

Managing water bankruptcy requires a shift from crisis management to bankruptcy management. The priority is no longer to “get back to normal”, but to prevent further irreversible damage, rebalance rights and claims within degraded carrying capacities, transform water-intensive sectors and development models, and support just transitions for those most affected.

Governance institutions must protect both water and its underlying natural capital. The existing institutions focus on protecting water as a good or service disregarding the natural capital that makes water available in the first place. Efforts to protect a product are ineffective when the processes that produce it are disrupted.

Recognizing water bankruptcy calls for developing legal and governance institutions that can effectively protect not only water but also the hydrological cycle and natural capital that make its production possible.

Water bankruptcy is a justice and security issue. The costs of overshoot and irreversibility fall disproportionately on smallholder farmers, rural and Indigenous communities, informal urban residents, women, youth, and downstream users, while benefits have often accrued to more powerful actors. How societies manage water bankruptcy will shape social cohesion, political stability, and peace.

Water bankruptcy management combines mitigation with adaptation. While water crisis management paradigms seek to return the system to normal conditions through mitigation efforts only, water bankruptcy management focuses on restoring what is possible and preventing further damages through mitigation combined with adaptation to new normals and constraints.

Water can serve as a bridge in a fragmented world. Water can align national priorities with international priorities and improve cooperation between and within nations. Roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals are used for agriculture, much of it by farmers in the Global South. Elevating water in global policy debates can help rebuild trust between South and North but also within nations, between rural and urban, left and right constituencies.

Water must be recognized as an upstream sector. Most national and international policy agendas treat water as a downstream impact sector where investments are focused on mitigating the imposed problems and externalities. The world must recognize water as an upstream opportunity sector where investments have long-term benefits for peace, stability, security, equity, economy, health, and the environment.

Water is an effective medium to fulfill the global environmental agenda. Investments in addressing water bankruptcy deliver major co-benefits for the global efforts to address its environmental problems while addressing the national security concerns of the UN member states.

Elevating water in the global policy agenda can renew international cooperation, increase the efficiency of environmental investments, and reaccelerate the halted progress of the three Rio Conventions to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and desertification.

A new global water agenda is urgently needed. Existing agendas and conventional water policies, focused mainly on WASH, incremental efficiency gains and generic IWRM guidelines, are not sufficient for the world’s current water reality. A fresh water agenda must be developed that takes Global Water Bankruptcy as a starting point and uses the 2026 and 2028 UN Water Conferences, the conclusion of the Water Action Decade in 2028, and the 2030 SDG 6 timeline as milestones for resetting how the world understands and governs water.

Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era | UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) (20 January) (press release)

Support Paper
Madani K. (2026) Water Bankruptcy: The Formal Definition, Water Resources Management, 40 (78) doi: 10.1007/s11269-025-04484-0)

IPS UN Bureau

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