Sustainability programs cover a substantial share of the global production of agricultural commodities such as coffee, impacting millions of smallholder farmers in emerging markets. We evaluate the rollout of a coffee sustainability program involving two leading third-party standards, in a remote area of Sumatra, Indonesia, implemented by an international exporter. We employ complementary quasi-experimental and randomized control trial approaches to evaluate the impacts of a baseline sustainability program launched in 2012, and an enhanced program offered to a randomly-selected subset of participating farmer groups in 2015. We find moderate and sometimes adverse impacts of the baseline program. Effects of the enhanced program are also mixed, though it leads to an improvement in subjective well-being. We also uncover a number of heterogenous impacts of the programs. Overall the results suggest caution around the application of such programs, particularly in settings with mixed livelihoods.
This research is conducted with Bustanul Arifin (Universitas Lampung) and Jeffrey Neilson (The University of Sydney). Research report: https://www.evidensia.eco/resources/37/download/
Speaker:
Russell Toth (The University of Sydney)
Thursday, 16 June 2021 at 10.00-11.30 WIB (GMT+7) or 1-2.30pm AEST
Participate on Zoom (registration required): https://bit.ly/fkp16june
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