ZEF Details

ONLINE ZEF Colloquium on Food sustainability standards and ag. cooperatives: Implications for the small farm sector of Côte d'Ivoire

June 18, 2020 | 13:30 h - 14:30 h

Online ZEF colloquium

Date: Thursday, June 18, 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm via Zoom.

Speaker: Jorge Sellare (ZEF Senior Researcher)

Title: Food sustainability standards and ag. cooperatives: Implications for the small farm sector of Côte d'Ivoire

Presenter:

Dr. Jorge Sellare is a Senior Researcher at ZEF and he his currently working on Land use and food security, Growth, inequality and poverty and New Technologies and has experience in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Côte d'Ivoire. He holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Göttingen.

Abstract:

Sustainability standards such as Fairtrade, UTZ, and Rainforest Alliance have been gaining importance in global value chains, with some of the major tropical commodities seeing significant increases in the share of their certified area in the last ten years. Despite differences in their requirements and the extent to which they focus on socioeconomic and environmental goals, all major sustainability standards claim that they are beneficial to farmers and workers in the small farm sector.

Although the growing body of literature that seeks to evaluate these claims is already rather comprehensive in terms of the standards, countries, crops and outcome variables it focuses on, it still has some shortcomings that need to be addressed. Most notably, it has not paid enough attention to the role that agricultural cooperatives might have in determining whether and to what extent farmers and workers benefit from participating in certified value chains. In this seminar, he will present the results of two studies that have been conducted using data from 1,000 farmers and workers randomly sampled from 50 cocoa cooperatives in Côte d’Ivoire. First, he discusses the importance of using a sampling design that sufficiently accounts for institutional heterogeneity in agricultural cooperatives and analyze whether farmer households benefit economically from Fairtrade certification once we control for cooperative effects. Second, he analyzes whether Fairtrade causes changes in agrochemical input use and what are its effects on aggregated pesticide toxicity and on the incidence of pesticide-related acute health symptoms among farmers and workers. He argues that cooperatives do matter in the analysis of sustainability standards and that future studies should give more explicit focus to cooperative heterogeneity, both in their sampling strategies and in their empirical

analyses.

Moreover, this presentation will be based on the following 2 papers: