Trans sustain: New Insights Into the Effectiveness of Voluntary Sustainability Standards

The globalization of contemporary food production and consumption in the absence of supranational laws and regulations has raised a number of issues related to the economic, environmental and social sustainability of current practices. Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS), particularly third-party, independent certifications, have aimed to step into the gap left by national governments. Yet, they have come under increased scrutiny regarding their goals of leading producing countries’ farmers towards more environmentally friendly and socially responsible practices while improving their economic situation.

Most prominently, there continues to be a lack of information on the true costs and benefits of certification, and rigorous evaluations of the economic advantage of VSS are rare. Strong evidence for improvements in farm-level environmental and social indicators is similarly scarce. Finally, it is unclear whether the focus on certification schemes alone is sufficient for a sustainable improvement of livelihoods, or whether other less-studied aspects (e.g. gender parity in production or alternative marketing schemes such as direct trade relationships) are essential to success. This research project will investigate these and other questions through the collection of multi-country, panel data of around 1200 coffee farmers in Central and South America and the construction of a meta-certification of the effectiveness of various certification schemes in comparison.

In order to achieve these goals, the project encompasses four separate but interconnected studies. Study 1 evaluates the institutional effectiveness of different VSS by comparing the strength of their rules as well as the strength of their enforcement mechanisms and constructing two separate indices to measure these aspects. Study 2 investigates the implementation of standards on the ground in certified farms and compares them to the certifications’ expected practices. Study 3 looks into the profitability of participation in certification schemes by drawing up income balances of farms that include variable and certification costs as well as value added through selling certified harvests. Study 4 finally goes beyond third-party labeling and asks the question whether alternative development approaches could have an even larger impact on sustainable livelihoods. In cooperation with the Hanns R. Neumann Foundation (HRNF), it will evaluate an HRNF project focused on gender empowerment in the coffee sector of Honduras to gain insights on the contribution of gender aspects to sustainable agricultural development.

While Study 1 constructs indices based on publically available information, including the governing documents of the certification schemes in question, Studies 2, 3, and 4 use the collection of primary farm-level data and a control group approach in order to most accurately compare the additionality of VSS to the counterfactual of no certification. Data collection for Studies 2 and 3 – which will be based on the same questionnaire – is planned in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Colombia, using differences in public service provision and governance structures to investigate whether such structural preconditions impact the effectiveness of implementation. Participating households will be drawn randomly in a multi-stage process from lists of exporters and national coffee institutes. In addition, non-certified farms will be included to control for confounding factors such as farm size, altitude, quality and variety of crop through the propensity-score matching method. The implementation of the HRNF gender training taking place in Honduras also followed a quasi-experimental method, such that a control group approach is equally applicable. Finally, data collection will occur at two points in time (2016 and 2019) to allow for variation over time and time-related confounding factors such as weather or global market prices.

Through the generation of a completely new panel dataset, the use of a broad theoretical background and robust econometric methodologies, and the participation of researchers from different countries and academic fields, this interdisciplinary project hopes to shed light on previously unanswered questions in sustainability research and simultaneously contribute to the evidence on how to best regulate sustainability in the global agrifood marketplace.