What public records can prove about a supplier — and what they cannot

Before you rely on a supplier check, it is worth knowing what the underlying public records can actually establish. ExporterTrace maps that, country by country and commodity by commodity — including, plainly, where the evidence runs out.

ExporterTrace restates public records and states their limits. It is not a certification, rating, clearance, or legal advice, and the absence of a record is never evidence that nothing happened.

Countries

What public records exist in each producing country, what they can establish about a supplier, and what they cannot. “Not assessed” means we have not looked — it is not a judgement about the country.

Brazil

Covered

Brazil publishes an unusually large amount of company-level public record in machine-readable form: federal labour and corruption registers, environmental embargoes, and a national rural property registry. Bulk datasets are generally open; single-record interactive lookup forms are generally not, which shapes what can be checked systematically.

Indonesia

Not assessed

Indonesia is a priority jurisdiction for assessment because of its role in palm, timber, rubber, cocoa, coffee, and nickel supply chains. We have not completed that assessment and make no claim about what can be checked here.

Colombia

Not assessed

Colombia is a candidate jurisdiction for coffee, cocoa, palm, cattle, timber, and extractives. We have not assessed its public records and make no claim about what can be checked here.

Commodities

The evidence chain for a commodity, and the point in that chain where public record typically stops.

Soy — Soy moves through a concentrated set of crushers and traders before export, which means the company named on a shipping document is often several steps removed from the land the crop was grown on.
Beef — Cattle typically move between properties before slaughter.
Timber — Timber evidence usually turns on species identification and harvest authorisation, both of which are documentary rather than observable from public registries alone.
Coffee — Coffee frequently passes through cooperatives, which aggregate output from many smallholders.

Regulations

What each rule asks an operator to hold, mapped to the evidence categories that might support it. This is a mapping, not a compliance determination, and nothing here is legal advice.

EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR, European Union)
German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG, Germany)
Lacey Act (Lacey Act, United States)

Where the company records live

ExporterTrace describes what is checkable. The records themselves are published on our country services, so that each jurisdiction’s corpus has one home and one canonical address.

BrazilTrace — Brazilian company records and ongoing monitoring