Responding to Globalization: Impacts of Certification on Colombian Small-Scale Coffee Growers

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Eco-certification of food and other agricultural products has been promoted as a way of making markets work for sustainability. Certification programs offer a price premium to producers who invest in more sustainable practices. The literature on the impacts of certification has focused primarily on the economic benefits farmers perceive from participating in these schemes. These benefits, however, are often subject to price variability, offering only a partial explanation of why farmers join and stay in certification programs. We evaluated the potential of the Rainforest Alliance certification program to foster more resilient social-ecological systems in the face of globalization. Using the case of Santander, Colombia, and a pair-based comparison of 86 households to effectively produce a robust counterfactual, we showed that certification provides important environmental benefits, while improving the well-being of farmers and their communities. Furthermore, the study showed that price premiums are only one of many elements defining the success of certification, particularly important for motivating farmers to join, but less so to explain retention and upgrading. The case of Colombian coffee growers illustrates how the connections between local social-ecological systems and larger global forces can produce more sustainable livelihoods and land uses.

Building the local food movement in Chiapas, Mexico: rationales, benefits, and limitations

“…Such labeling mechanisms have proliferated in recent decades to connect specialty, small-scale producers in the Global South to consumers in the Global North and considerable literature has attempted to understand their social and environmental outcomes (Raynolds 2000;Mutersbaugh 2004;Gonzalez and Nigh 2005;Calo and Wise 2005;Gomez Tovar et al 2005). While some research suggests they have facilitated important reductions in pesticide use and bolstered social capital (FAO 2011;Rueda and Lambin 2013), others conclude that transnational AFNs produce only marginal success (Chiputwa et al 2015;Raynolds 2014) if not outright failure (Hatanaka 2010). The sharpest critiques of these initiatives observe that just as organic and fair trade labels attempt to counteract liberalized food markets and the proverbial "race-to-the-bottom" they simultaneously resonate with neoliberal logic by looking to the power of the market to resolve socio-ecological problems (Bartley and Smith 2010;Guthman 2007).…”

Energizing agroforestry: Ilex guayusa as an additional commodity to diversify Amazonian agroforestry systems

“…Certification of tropical agricultural commodities for instance, is a strategy to show more socially and ecologically beneficial production standards in order to distinguish these products in their global value chains (Bishop et al 2009;Rueda & Lambin 2013). An alternative approach is the promotion of an ecologically and socially more beneficial form of tropical agriculture, that is agroforestry (McNeely & Schroth 2006;Mosquera-Losada et al 2008;Anderson & Zerriffi 2012;Nair & Garrity 2012), combined with certification (Tscharntke et al 2015).…”

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“…Colombia maintained its national coffee board throughout the crisis and launched an aggressive program of product differentiation. This resulted in substantial growth of the industry and significant benefits for farmers, beyond price premiums (Rueda and Lambin 2013b). Colombia's success contrasts with other coffee producing nations that failed to integrate the changing international domain of governance into national institutions.…”

“…Today, all major agricultural commodities have embraced some form of market mechanisms to advance their sustainability commitments (Rueda et al 2017). For Colombia, the growth of these market segments and therefore the success of the programa de cafés especiales has also produced significant positive outcomes for farmers and their resource base (Rueda and Lambin 2013b).…”