Ghana's Cocoa Traceability System — GPS Farm Mapping for EU Deforestation-Free Compliance

Ghana is the world's second-largest cocoa producer, sending around 60% of its exports to the EU, which puts it squarely in the path of the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR): traders must prove with farm-level GPS coordinates that cocoa was not grown on land cleared after 31 December 2020.
Under the EU- and BMZ-funded Sustainable Cocoa Programme, delivered with GIZ, the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) piloted its Ghana Cocoa Traceability System (GCTS) in the Assin Fosu district: GPS-enabled smartphones mapped more than 40,000 farm plots and registered over 20,000 farmers, 40% of them women, while more than 4,000 farmers and 1,500 supply-chain actors (purchasing clerks, depot keepers, transporters) were trained on the new procedures. By the 2023/24 lean season the pilot had traced 1,230 bags (about 77.3 tonnes) of cocoa end to end, and eight licensed buying companies covering 60% of the internal market ran the system in parallel before its national rollout in August 2025.
Independent reviewers flag real vulnerabilities. Harvard cacao researcher Carla D. Martin has warned that "there are ways to cheat the system — you can sell false geolocation points," and Ghana's own illegal gold-mining ("galamsey") boom destroyed nearly 9,000 hectares of protected forest by end-2024 while remaining entirely outside EUDR's scope, so deforestation pressure can simply displace into an unmonitored sector even as cocoa itself is tightly traced. EUDR's own compliance deadlines have also slipped twice, to December 2026 for large traders and June 2027 for small enterprises.
The programme is a genuine, large-scale traceability build-out with verifiable farm-mapping numbers, but its claim to guarantee deforestation-free cocoa still rests on geolocation data that outside experts say can be falsified, and it says nothing about the untraced deforestation occurring in parallel through mining.

Read the full analysis: https://www.sustainable-supply-chains.org/news/from-pilot-to-national-rollout-ghanas-cocoa-traceability-system/