Kanopy measures forest reserves from open satellite data and records a fingerprint of each measurement on-chain so anyone can recheck it. This week we pointed the same pipeline at Nigerian cocoa.
From 30 December 2026, an EU importer must show that its cocoa was not grown on forest cleared after 2020, and that it was farmed legally. Kam Origin runs that test on 20 mapped cocoa farms in Ondo, four cocoa estates, and four forest reserves where cocoa farming inside the boundary is documented. It adds the EU's own reference forest map (JRC Global Forest Cover 2020) to Kanopy's existing layers.
What we found:
- Legality is the bigger risk. 8 of the 20 farms sit inside a gazetted forest reserve. Around the Etung cocoa estates in Cross River, over a third of the land is reserve land.
- The EU map is kinder to Ondo cocoa than tree-cover maps are. Around the Oda plantation, the EU map calls only 4% of the land forest, while tree-cover layers count 75% as trees that aren't forest. A buyer using only one kind of map would get the wrong answer either way.
- Oluwa Forest Reserve lost 17,186 ha of tree cover from 2021 to 2025, about 21% of the reserve, the fastest loss of any site we checked.
- No farm can be cleared or failed from space alone. None of the 20 has a walked boundary; they are survey points, and one sits in a town.
That last point led to the second piece: Kam Field Capture, a phone app for walking a farm boundary. For cocoa it now records the farmer's account of the land's history, counts pods on sample trees, and estimates what the farm can produce. It flags sales of more than twice that estimate, which is how cocoa from one farm gets laundered through another.
Read the cocoa report: https://kamhq.com/kanopy/origin/
This is a desk study from public data. No farm was visited, and farm positions are withheld because several sit inside reserves.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.