‘It’s up to the market to decide’: Revealing and concealing power in the sustainable tea supply chain

In 2007, Unilever, the world’s largest tea company, announced plans to source its entire tea supply sustainably, beginning with the certification of its tea producers in East Africa to Rainforest Alliance standards. As a major buyer of Kenyan tea, Unilever’s decision pushed tea producers across Kenya to subscribe to Rainforest Alliance’s sustainable agriculture standard in order to maintain access to the global tea market; according to a 2018 report, over 85% of Kenya’s tea producers were Rainforest Alliance certified. Drawing on ethnographic material among supply chain actors across different sites along the sustainable tea value chain (from those designing and disseminating standards to tea traders to smallholder tea farmers), this article examines how these actors frequently attributed the power to determine the outcomes of certification to a faceless ‘market’. Deferring to ‘the market’, we observe, served primarily to mask the outsized power of lead firms (in particular Unilever) to determine conditions of tea production and trade. At the same time, ‘the market’ was also in some cases qualified by our interlocutors, allowing them implicitly (and at times explicitly) to reveal power and give it a face. Concealing and revealing power in this way, we suggest, can be seen as a mode of engagement among supply chain actors operating in ‘sustainable’ supply chains, like the Rainforest Alliance-certified Kenyan tea supply chain, in which the power of lead firms tends to be consolidated through market-driven sustainability initiatives. Such a mode of engagement mitigates exclusion from sustainable supply chains while maintaining space for critique.

The Effect of Cocoa Certification Program in Increasing Production and Farmers Income in Tapango Barat Village, Tapango District, Polewali Mandar Regency

The production of Indonesian cocoa beans is significantly increasing but is not in line with its quality. The quality has decreased such as less fermented, not dry, inconsistency of the size & taste. Since then, reputation of Indonesia cocoa beans was considered lower than international standard which caused price is relatively cheap compared to other production countries. The low quality of cocoa beans is due to that the age of cocoa plants in Indonesia is more than 17 years so productivity has declined, besides that cocoa pod borer since 1995 until now has not been eradicated 100%. So, the age of the plant greatly influences the amount of fruit that can be produced. The benefits of cocoa certification program to the farmers production and income are the creation of agribusiness insight and industrial culture in the community, the development of downstream agribusiness subsystem activities in the form of post-harvest, processing and marketing activities which ultimately increase farmers' income and welfare through increased production also will increased foreign exchange earnings for Country. Tapango Barat is a cocoa development center area certified by the Rainforest Alliance (RA) from 2015 until now with the aim of describing the cocoa certification program in Tapango Barat Village, calculating the level of farmers' income and analyzing the effect of the cocoa certification program on increasing farmer production and income. This research was conducted in January – April 2017 using descriptive, income analysis, and multiple regression analysis methods. The results showed that the Mesa Peolo farmer group certified by the Rainforest Alliance (RA) had an income of IDR 17,106,039.073 each year. This shows that the production results from certification program directly influence cocoa farmers’ income.

Qualidade e sustentabilidade: sistemas de certificação do café sob a ótica dos Pilares da Qualidade

Qualidade e sustentabilidade são conceitos complexos, mas cada vez mais importantes no contexto da produção de alimentos. Neste cenário, os sistemas de certificações assumem papel importante de coordenação das diversas cadeias. Este trabalho utiliza a metodologia de análise dos pilares da qualidade proposta por Leme (2007) para analisar quatro certificações ligadas ao café: o Programa de Qualidade do Café (PQC), a certificação do Café do Cerrado, a certificação Rainforest Alliance e a certificação Utz Certified. O objetivo é unir os conceitos de certificação e qualidade sob um referencial teórico único, analisando como estas certificações abordam a qualidade em suas normas e diretrizes. Para isto, os pontos principais de cada programa de certificação foram analisados e sistematizados segundo o modelo proposto. O modelo dos pilares da qualidade demonstrou-se muito útil para sistematizar e analisar os objetos de estudo no que se refere aos principais aspectos ligados à certificação e qualidade no agronegócio café.

Effects of shade-coffee certification programs on bird, trees and butterfly diversity in Colombia

In the last decade coffee certification programs have grown rapidly in Latin America, encouraging producers to harvest coffee based on production standards intended to enhance biodiversity conservation. However, few studies have tested whether such programs have a positive conservation impact. To date, research has focused on comparing community similarity between forests and plantations, but the question of whether certified plantations provide refuges for biodiversity in regions where all the forest has been lost remains untested. Here, we compare bird, butterfly and plant communities in highly deforested regions in Santander, Colombia, to determine the potential conservation role of two certification programs: Rainforest Alliance and Rainforest Alliance+Organic. We used 13 farms to census birds, butterflies, and trees, and quantified structural characteristics of the shade. We found little difference in most measures of diversity and composition of birds, butterfly and plant communities between types of plantations. However, despite high variation across farms, butterfly richness and abundance increased with the decrease in the use of pesticides in plantations. These results suggest that reduced use of chemical compounds in certified coffee plantations might enhance conservation of butterfly communities. The biodiversity associated with these coffee plantations and the high deforestation rates in Santander, suggest that irrespective of their certification type they provide the last refuges for biodiversity conservation in this region.

Evaluacion de la percepcion que tienen los caficultores frente la certificacion rainforest alliance de las provincias comuneras y guanenta, departamento de santader

Para poder evaluar la percepción que tienen los caficultores frente a la certificación Rainforest Alliance (RA), en el año 2014, se aplicaron 58 encuestas personalizadas a caficultores certificados con el RA de las provincias comuneras y guanenta, departamento de Santander. Este trabajo se enfocó en varios tipos de investigación: “Descriptiva, explicativa, y exploratoria” porque no solo se basó en los factores externos e internos, también fue importante explorar las relaciones socioeconómicas, ambientales y poder describir la percepción de los productores sobre la certificación y la realidad de como la experimentan los caficultores certificados con el sello RA. Los resultados indican que varios requisitos establecidos por la Norma de Agricultura Sostenible (NAS) de RA, ya se cumplían por parte de los caficultores antes de estar certificados, como ofrecer en las fincas buenas condiciones de pago y trato justo a los trabajadores, efectuar prácticas de conservación de suelos, llevar registros contables y de labores en la finca. En este estudio se encontró que la gran mayoría de caficultores certificados en este municipio son pequeños y medianos productores los cuales tienen áreas entre 0 a 20 hectáreas cultivadas en su gran mayoría en café variedad Castillo y variedad Colombia. Muchos de estos caficultores encuestados tienen poco tiempo de haber obtenido el sello RA entre 0 a 5 Años y el que más tiempo lleva con el sello son 12 años. Algunos de ellos cuentan con 2 o más sellos entre los cuales se destaca los sellos Nespresso, Orgánico, 4C, y Practice. Desde la percepción que tienen los caficultores del municipio del valle de san José y con base en los resultados de la investigación podemos decir que muchos no tenían ningún conocimiento de la norma Rainforest Alliance y mucho menos de los beneficios que obtendrían de esta. Algunos si admitieron que venían presentando una necesidad y que a través de la implementación de la norma Rainforest Alliance querían suplir. Los caficultores encuestados manifestaron que el hecho de poder contar con nuevos canales de comercialización, y bonificaciones en el precio del café en el mercado por carga, fueron los motivos para que empezaran a implementar Rainforest Alliance en sus fincas. Otro tema que podemos concluir es que muchos de ellos consideraron un motivo fundamental para certificarse la gestión de la federación Nacional de cafeteros por incluirlos en un grupo selecto y la facilidad de financiamiento y acompañamiento para la implementación del sello. También se puede concluir en esta investigación fue la necesidad que tenían los caficultores de tener una agricultura amigable con el medio ambiente y ser sostenibles con el tiempo, ya que hoy en día se debe proteger el medio ambiente que nos queda y tratar de recuperar el que hemos deteriorado.Adicionalmente esta investigación nos permite concluir que el factor económico también incidió a la hora de tomar decisiones; ya que ellos veían que otros caficultores del gremio recibían mayores ingresos y que adicionalmente les crearon una gran expectativa económica por involucrarse en este proceso. Otro punto importante para concluir fue la claridad del proceso ya que como caficultores eran conscientes en que adquirir Rainforest Alliance les generaría una gran responsabilidad, gran trabajo y un gasto económico en todos y cada uno de los aspectos sobre los que trata la norma en sus 10 principios y que debían darle continuidad al proceso.

Standardization as Spaces of Diversity

Standards have become an important object of investigation in social science and STS scholars have called for a more systematic program of research to study standards or standardization (Busch 2011; Timmermans and Epstein 2010). In this considering concepts paper, we engage with their program for a sociology of standards and propose a new way to think about standards and standardization as “spaces of diversity” so as to push our thinking forward about how standards, standardization and innovation processes are linked. We consider standardization as the dynamic interaction in three spaces (standards in the making, standards in action, and standards in circulation) where diversity reemerges only to be tentatively reduced or limited through new rounds of standard setting. We illustrate how diversity is an integral part of standardization with the example of the Rainforest Alliance standard for tea production as it circulated from Costa Rica to Kenya, where it was made and put into action and then circulated again to other African, Asian, and Latin American countries. We end with a proposition for future research on standards to address these other spaces of standards as loci of standardization and innovation.