Speaker
Description
Voluntary sustainability standards promise to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and at the same time conserve on-farm ecosystem health and biodiversity. However, it is still unclear whether sustainability standards can achieve these goals because the empirical literature has mainly focused on assessing their effects on single sustainability dimensions. Therefore, in this study, we take an interdisciplinary approach to understand the simultaneous effects of sustainability standards on socioeconomic and ecological outcomes. We use representative household data from 812 cocoa-producing households and ecological data from 119 cocoa farms from Ghana. Our results suggest that sustainability standards have positive effects on cocoa yield, net cocoa income, return to land and shade tree crown cover and diversity but negative effects on predation rates, bird abundance and richness and the bioacoustic index. Exploration of underlying mechanisms reveal a positive association between being certified and increased farm intensification. This could be because certified farmers benefit from production-related interventions offered by the sustainability standards. While more intensified farming increases socioeconomic outcomes, this may also negatively affect ecological outcomes. We therefore recommend that sustainability standards should put more focus on training related to environmentally friendly practices, as well as control mechanisms that ensure that environmentally friendly practices are indeed adopted.
