His torically low prices in the conventional coffee market have caused financial and social hardship among coffee farmers. In the face of this crisis, specialty markets have attracted the attention of the international donor community. These market segments have shown consistent growth over the last decade and exhibit price premiums in international markets.Therefore, if higher prices are passed on to farmers, access to specialty markets could help to alleviate the crisis brought on by low prices in the conventional sector. The present study attempts to identify the factors that determine farmers' participation in specialized markets and whether participation in these markets leads to higher prices for farmers. A two-stage model is used to analyze farmers' marketing decisions and their effect on the prices received.This procedure allows us to control for the endogeneity bias introduced by the marketing choice. Our results indicate that farmers participating in the specialty coffee segment do in fact receive higher prices than those participating in conventional channels. Additionally, we find that participation in cooperatives has a positive impact on the probability that a farmer chooses to grow specialty coffee and analogously the prices that they receive. Based on these results it seems that efforts to increase participation in the specialty coffee segment and in cooperatives would help to lessen some of the hardships brought on by low prices in the conventional coffee sector.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We investigate land-use dynamics in Jambi, Sumatra, one of the hotspots of Indonesia's recent oil palm boom. Data from a structured village survey are used to analyze the role of socioecono mic and policy factors. Oil palm is partly grown on large plantations, but smallholders are also involved significantly. We find that, in spite of significant oil palm expansion, rubber remains the dominant crop. Most of the oil palm growth takes place on previous fallow and rubber land. Oil palm has not been a major driver of deforestation. Much of the forest in Jambi was cleared more than 20 years ago, and rubber was an established cash crop long before the oil palm boom started. However, oil palm growth occurs in locations with ongoing logging activities, so indirect effects on deforestation are likely. The government's transmigration program of the 1980s and 1990s was instrumental for the start and spread of oil palm in Jambi. Some autochthonous villages have adopted oil palm, but adoption started later compared to migrants from Java, and it happens at a slower pace. While the transmigration program benefited many of the participating families, it has contributed to the risk of unequal socioeconomic developments in Jambi. Terms of use: Documents in

This paper presents an analysis of GlobalGAP adoption by small-scale fruit and vegetable farmers in Thailand focusing on GlobalGAP group certification, the costs and perceived benefits of GlobalGAP adoption, and the factors influencing standard adoption. GlobalGAP is the most important private standard for producers in the Thai horticultural sector concerning access to high-value markets, especially to Europe. We find that support by donors, exporters and public-private partnerships is vital to enable small-scale farmers to adopt the standard. GlobalGAP group certification encourages the formation of new institutional arrangements between farmers, exporters and donors. In our sample only participants from a development program were successful in adopting GlobalGAP and within the program farmers were either organized in certification groups where the Quality Management System (QMS) was run by farmers themselves, by an exporter or by a donor. The results of the adoption analysis suggest that household characteristics (age, education, wealth, availability of family labor), farm characteristics (farm size, intensity of irrigation use), the number of agricultural trainings subjects attended, prior involvement in high-value supply chains, as well as exporter and donor support in terms of costs of compliance, technical advice and management of the QMS influence GlobalGAP adoption.

Conservation agriculture (CA) is often perceived to provide "win-win" outcomes for farmers leading to reduced erosion and off-site sedimentation, as well as improved soil fertility and productivity. However, adoption rates for CA in many regions of the world remain below expected levels. This article looks at the effects of participation in organic markets and farmers' organizations on the adoption of soil conservation practices. Based on original survey data from 241 small-scale farm households in Honduras, we find that both participation in organic markets and farmer-based groups have positive effects on the number of soil conservation practices adopted. The results indicate that besides supply-oriented policy measures, such as the provision of technical assistance and extension, demand-related factors are likely to play an important role in sustainable soil management. Demand-oriented policy measures include support for labeling initiatives and consumer education to facilitate value-added product differentiation and market segmentation. Copyright (c) 2010 International Association of Agricultural Economists.

Tropical biodiversity is threatened by the expansion of oil-palm plantations. Reduced-impact farming systems such as agroforests, have been proposed to increase biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. In regions where oil-palm plantations already dominate the landscape, this increase can only be achieved through systematic ecological restoration. However, our knowledge about the underlying ecological and socio-economic processes, constraints, and trade-offs of ecological restoration in oil-palm landscapes is very limited. To bridge this gap, we established a long-term biodiversity enrichment experiment. We established experimental tree islands in a conventional oil-palm plantation and systematically varied plot size, tree diversity, and tree species composition. Here, we describe the rationale and the design of the experiment, the ecosystem variables (soil, topography, canopy openness) and biotic characteristics (associated vegetation, invertebrates, birds) of the experimental site prior to the establishment of the experiment, and initial experimental effects on the fauna. Already one year after establishment of the experiment, tree plantings had an overall positive effect on the bird and invertebrate communities at the plantation scale. The diversity and abundance of invertebrates was positively affected by the size of the tree islands. Based on these results, we expect a further increase of biodiversity and associated ecological functions in the future. The long-term interdisciplinary monitoring of ecosystem variables, flora, fauna, and socio-economic aspects will allow us to evaluate the suitability of tree islands as a restoration measure. Thereof, guidelines for ecologically improved and socio-economically viable restoration and management concepts could be developed.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Land-use transitions can enhance the livelihoods of smallholder farmers but potential economic-ecological trade-offs remain poorly understood. Here, we present an interdisciplinary study of the environmental, social and economic consequences of land-use transitions in a tropical smallholder landscape on Sumatra, Indonesia. We find widespread biodiversity-profit trade-offs resulting from land-use transitions from forest and agroforestry systems to rubber and oil palm monocultures, for 26,894 aboveground and belowground species and whole-ecosystem multidiversity. Despite variation between ecosystem functions, profit gains come at the expense of ecosystem multifunctionality, indicating far-reaching ecosystem deterioration. We identify landscape compositions that can mitigate trade-offs under optimal land-use allocation but also show that intensive monocultures always lead to higher profits. These findings suggest that, to reduce losses in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, changes in economic incentive structures through well-designed policies are urgently needed.

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