Advanced Value Chain Collaboration in Ghana’s Cocoa Sector: An Entry Point for Integrated Landscape Approaches?

Abstract

Value chain analyses have focused mainly on collaboration between chain actors, often neglecting collaboration “beyond the chain” with non-chain actors to tackle food security, poverty and sustainability issues in the landscapes in which these value chains are embedded. Comparing conventional and advanced value chain collaborations involving small-scale cocoa farmers in Ghana, this paper analyzes the merits of a more integrated approach toward value chain collaboration. It particularly asks whether advanced value chain collaboration targeting cocoa-producing areas potentially offers an entry point for implementing a landscape approach. The findings detail current chain actors and institutions and show how advanced value chain collaboration has a greater positive impact than conventional value chain collaboration on farmers’ social, human and natural capital. The paper concludes that the integrated approach, focus on learning, and stable relationships with small-scale farmers inherent in advanced value chain collaboration makes it both more sustainable and effective at the local level than conventional approaches. However, its scope and the actors’ jurisdictional powers and self-organization are too limited to be the sole tool in negotiating land use and trade-offs at the landscape level. To evolve as such would require certification beyond the farm level, partnering with other landscape stakeholders, and brokering by bridging organizations.

Roaming through the Maze of Maize in Northern Ghana. A Systems Approach to Explore the Long-Term Effects of a Food Security Intervention

“…Examples of recent popular systems approaches in development are landscape approaches and food systems approaches. A landscape approach is an integrated framework to address complex challenges that transcend environmental, economic, social, and political boundaries [64,65]. A food systems approach provides a framework for systematic analysis of the two-way interaction between the range of value chain activities, food security outcomes and the social and environmental context in which the intervention takes place [66][67][68][69][70][71].…”

Envisioning the Future of Mosaic Landscapes: Actor Perceptions in a Mixed Cocoa/Oil-Palm Area in Ghana

“…Most farms are not larger than 0.2-1.2 ha, although a few medium-(5-10 ha) to large-scale plantations also exist (Deans et al 2017). From an aerial view, however, the smallholdings appear like large-scale plantations due to increasing landscape homogenization (Asubonteng et al 2020).…”

Commodity-Centric Landscape Governance as a Double-Edged Sword: The Case of Soy and the Cerrado Working Group in Brazil

“…Through suggestions for "jurisdictional certification" (Nepstad et al, 2013), the gap between geography-centric and commoditycentric approaches is becoming blurred and may be moving toward hybrid formats. Indeed, how landscape governance can effectively reduce sourcing risks (e.g., through the creation of verified sourcing areas) and how supply chain initiatives can be entry points for integrated landscape approaches have been key research frontiers (Kissinger et al, 2013;Deans et al, 2018;Ingram et al, 2018;Ros-Tonen et al, 2018).…”

“…In regions where one or more agricultural commodities stand out as drivers of land use change, their supply chains have become central to landscape governance, as in the cases of the GTS or of the G4 and MPF-TAC cattle agreements in the Brazilian Amazon (Gibbs et al, 2015(Gibbs et al, , 2016, deforestation-free palm oil in Borneo (Van Houten and De Koning, 2018), or sustainable cocoa in Ghana (Deans et al, 2018). We conceptualize such initiatives as commodity-centric landscape governance (CCLG), for its features arguably allow for characterizing it as a specific (sub)type of landscape approach.…”