ABSTRACT

Voluntary Sustainability Standards have become a popular private governance framework for more sustainable agri-food value chains. However, recent mainstreaming efforts have increased competition between standards and driven down price premiums. This study employs a dataset of 659 Honduran coffee producers to examine whether the most widely used standards in the coffee sector (4C, Fairtrade, Fairtrade/organic, UTZ Certified and Rainforest Alliance) represent effective solutions for improving the social, environmental and economic sustainability practices of smallholder farmers under such conditions. It presents 54 farm-level indicators, compared across five standard systems, and links field results to a discussion of the strategies and governance prospects of voluntary standards. We find that no scheme has managed to grow substantially while maintaining strong additionality: commercially successful standards show little impact, while stricter schemes create high entry barriers and unresolved opportunity costs. Successful mainstreaming would require better cost coverage of sustainability improvements by value chain actors .

摘要

自愿性可持续性标准已成为一种流行的私人治理框架，以实现更可持续的农业食品价值链。然而，最近的主流化努力增加了标准之间的竞争并压低了价格溢价。本研究采用了 659 家洪都拉斯咖啡生产商的数据集来检验咖啡行业最广泛使用的标准（4C、公平贸易、公平贸易/有机、UTZ 认证和雨林联盟）是否代表了改善社会、环境和经济可持续性实践的有效解决方案在这种情况下的小农户。它提出了 54 个农场级指标，在五个标准系统之间进行了比较，并将实地结果与自愿标准的战略和治理前景的讨论联系起来。我们发现，没有任何计划能够在保持强大的额外性的同时实现大幅增长：商业上成功的标准几乎没有影响，而更严格的计划会产生较高的进入壁垒和未解决的机会成本。成功的主流化需要价值链参与者更好地覆盖可持续性改进的成本。