Commodity production drives roughly 27% of global deforestation1. This loss accelerates biodiversity decline, degrades soils, and undermines forests’ capacity to sequester carbon. In response, governments are increasingly turning to market-based environmental governance mechanisms to curb deforestation in global supply chains. Notable examples include New York State’s proposed Tropical Rainforest Economic & Environmental Sustainability (TREES) Act and the European Union Regulation on Deforestation-Free Products (EUDR).
The EUDR, expected to enter into force in December 2026, will require producers of deforestation-risk commodities to provide polygon-level evidence that their products are deforestation-free. While these policies are designed to advance environmental goals, they also raise urgent questions about equity and inclusion in global supply chains.
At the center of these concerns are smallholder farmers. Small-scale and family farms manage approximately 87% of the world’s agricultural land2. In many deforestation-intensive value chains—such as timber, beef, and palm oil—smallholders make up a substantial share of producers3-5. Yet these actors often lack the financial, technical, and administrative capacity to comply with stringent traceability and verification requirements. As a result, many fear exclusion from global markets as sustainability regulations take effect.
This raises a critical question: Will well-intentioned deforestation governance inadvertently reinforce existing social inequities by pushing smallholders out of global supply chains?
As an interdisciplinary social scientist with a background in supply chains, my dissertation research is motivated by this tension between environmental ambition and social justice. Using a mixed-methods approach, my work addresses three core questions:
- How do scholars identify and assess smallholder exclusion driven by market-based sustainability governance?
How does involuntary deforestation-free and traceability governance reshape supply chain structures and actor participation? - Where are producers most vulnerable to exclusion under deforestation-free and traceability requirements?
To answer these questions, I engaged directly with a wide range of supply chain stakeholders—including corporate actors, producers, non-governmental organizations, and scholars—to capture diverse perspectives on how sustainability governance alters sourcing strategies and supply chain organization. These insights inform the development of a machine learning model that estimates the likelihood of exclusion for individual farms from deforestation-free supply chains.
By spatializing the model’s outputs, we can identify geographic hotspots where producers are most at risk of being excluded. This approach enables more targeted interventions, allowing industry actors and policymakers to direct support—such as technical assistance or financing—to producers who face the greatest barriers to compliance. Importantly, this work may also provide producers with greater visibility into downstream markets, helping to reduce exploitation by buyers who capitalize on information asymmetries.
Tracing global supply chains, however, is far from straightforward. Many supply chains are deliberately opaque, fluid, or informal in order to protect competitive advantage, intellectual property, or business relationships. Yet improving traceability and transparency is essential for addressing unsustainable resource extraction and human rights violations embedded in the production of everyday goods.
The University of Michigan Librarian Team and the Library Mini-Grant have been instrumental in overcoming these challenges. Through librarian consultations, we explored how to “quilt” together disparate datasets—including trade, corporate ownership, and tax records—to uncover hidden links within global supply chains. We also developed approaches to visualizing supply chain networks using geospatial data, enabling us to identify value chains that may be particularly vulnerable to exacerbating inequities in smallholder market access. These methods allow us to work more effectively with supply chain actors to mitigate social justice risks before exclusion occurs.
In addition, financial support from the Library Mini-Grant enabled international fieldwork to engage directly with supply chain stakeholders navigating the implementation of sustainability governance. These conversations were critical for validating the assumptions and predictors embedded in our machine learning model, ensuring that its outputs reflect on-the-ground realities and remain scientifically robust. Without the support of the University of Michigan Librarian Team, our findings would be far less grounded—and far less actionable.
Although this research is ongoing and will be published in the coming year, one conclusion is already clear: environmental governance in global supply chains must prioritize both procedural and distributive justice. Regulations such as the TREES Act and the EUDR cannot be designed in isolation from the political, territorial, economic, and social contexts of the regions they aim to govern. Policymakers must meaningfully involve all affected actors—smallholders, family farms, and large producers alike—throughout the entire policy lifecycle. One-off consultations do not constitute procedural justice; sustained engagement is essential.
Equally important is distributive justice. The costs, benefits, and risks of implementing deforestation-free supply chain requirements must be shared fairly, ensuring that no single group bears disproportionate harm for the sake of collective environmental gains6. If evidence shows that smallholders are systematically disadvantaged by these policies, then regulations must be adapted accordingly. Potential solutions could include mandatory smallholder sourcing requirements or quotas alongside deforestation-free criteria. While such measures may increase short-term costs, they help ensure that environmental governance does not deepen social inequities—and may instead catalyze transformative change in forest-risk commodity supply chains.
Sustainability solutions are often framed as “win–win,” yet no policy is immune to unintended consequences. Identifying the ripple effects of sustainability governance can be uncomfortable, politically inconvenient, or methodologically challenging—but it is essential. Equitable sustainability governance depends on confronting these effects directly.
We look forward to continuing this work with the University of Michigan Librarian Team and to sharing our findings in future blog posts.