The Impact of Fair Trade Certification for Coffee Farmers in Peru

By Ruerd Ruben, R. Fort. 2012

298 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Smallholder farmers producing for Fair Trade market outlets are usually considered to benefit from better prices and stable market outlets. However, many empirical studies verifying this impact suffer from strong selection bias. This study uses a balanced sample of Fair Trade farmers and likewise nonFair Trade producers of organic and conventional coffee from Peru to compare the net effects on production, income and expenditures, wealth and investments, and attitudes and perceptions. After careful matching, we find only modest direct income and production effects, but significant changes in organization, input use, wealth and assets, and risk attitudes. Moreover, important differences between farmers with early and more recent FT affiliation are registered.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Plant Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4419b0d15f8f6be84690dd4e97f3f45026c5af90

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Citations in the corpus

Is voluntary certification of tropical agricultural commodities achieving sustainability goals for small-scale producers? A review of the evidence (2017, methodology): “…is carried out through one-to-one pairing of observations with the same propensity score, nearest neighbor, or kernel matching which weights observations in the control group according to propensityscore distance from the observation in the treatment group (Austin 2011, Ruben and Fort 2012).”
Organic Agriculture, Food Security, and the Environment (2018, background): “During this transition period, farmers cannot yet benefit from an organic price premium, but yields are often particularly low due to learning and experimentation with the new production methods (Caldwell et al. 2014, Ruben & Fort 2012, Weber 2011).”
Using agriculture for development: Supply- and demand-side approaches (2020, unknown): “But Ruben and Fort (2012) find only modest direct income and production effects among coffee farmers and the early benefits potentially generated by Fair Trade contracts tend to be eroded by unlimited entry (de Janvry, McIntosh, and Sadoulet, 2015).”
The effectiveness of agricultural certification in developing countries: A systematic review (2018, background): “Many studies report mixed findings or cases where effects are only marginal (Nelson and Martin 2013, Ruben 2012).”
Sustainability Standards, Gender, and Nutrition among Smallholder Farmers in Uganda (2016, background): “…and Organic certification schemes for producers of coffee (Arnould, Plastina, & Ball, 2009; Chiputwa, Spielman, & Qaim, 2015; Jena, Chichaibelu, Stellmacher, & Grote, 2012; Ruben & Fort, 2012), cocoa (Jones & Gibbon, 2011), and tropical fruits (Kleemann, Abdulai, & Buss, 2014; Ruben, 2008).”
Limitations of Contract Farming as a Pro-poor Strategy: The Case of Maize Outgrower Schemes in Upper West Ghana (2018, methodology): “Propensity score matching (PSM) is often used to evaluate the impacts of a binary treatment variable (for example, Fischer and Qaim 2012; Ruben and Fort 2012).”
The ambivalent impact of coffee certification on farmers' welfare: A matched panel approach for cooperatives in Central Kenya (2016, background): “Even with small net income effects, Ruben and Fort (2012) find significant livelihood improvements in credit access and durable expenditure that are related to reduced risk aversion.”
Reviewing the impacts of coffee certification programmes on smallholder livelihoods (2017, background): “Ruben and Fort (2012) reported that Fair trade cooperatives invested most of their premium into roads, while Chiputwa et al. (2015) reported investment of premiums into processing facilities in Uganda.”
Food standards, certification, and poverty among coffee farmers in Uganda (2015, methodology): “Propensity score matching (PSM) is often used to evaluate impacts of a binary treatment variable (e.g., Fischer & Qaim, 2012; Ruben & Fort, 2012).”