World cocoa production faces crucial challenges. The demand for cocoa is rapidly and steadily growing, driven by higher incomes across emerging economies, urbanization and the westernization of diets (Reardon et al., 2009;... [ view full abstract ]
World cocoa production faces crucial challenges. The demand for cocoa is rapidly and steadily growing, driven by higher incomes across emerging economies, urbanization and the westernization of diets (Reardon et al., 2009; Rueda y Lambin, 2014). But current cocoa production is marked by a combination of low productivity, high price volatility and high concentration of value in the lower links of the supply chain. This has limited production capacity and impoverished socioeconomic conditions of about 5 million small farmers worldwide.
A number of public and private initiatives to mitigate such effects have been established. Eco-certifications and other privately-dirven instruments attempt to enhance environmental protection, improve labor conditions, increase social capital, reduce the reputational risk of companies ,and generate more income for small producers. This could eventually help cocoa farmers to insert them in more valuable supply chains. Most studies evaluating impacts of certification focus on the economic effects; studies on environmental performance and sustainability are scant.
Using the Global Value Chain Approach we aim at evaluating the effects of voluntary certifications on upgrading. We look at upgrading from three perspectives: social, economic, and environmental. Upgrading is defined by farmers' ability to enhance their position in the value chain, producing and capturing a higher portion of the value created by means of higher bargaining power, better contract agreements, larger appropriation of (tacit) knowledge about quality, technologies, and market outlets and improvement on natural assets.
This work is based in 207 surveys and field transects conducted in four provinces in the west coast of Ecuador. A first round of surveys was conducted at the end of 2013 in Guayas, Los Rios, Manabí. The second round conducted in the Esmeraldas province was conducted in mid-2015 as an extension of the first round study to include the northern region of the coast. We compared the ability of certified and non-certified farmers to join higher value chains as well as the environmental and land practices derived from their type of market insertion (i.e., for mainstream, certified or high-quality cocoa).
