The global cocoa trade network is highly concentrated. The top 5 producers account for 75 percent of exports. Although recent research shows that agricultural trade was resilient to the 2020 pandemic, cocoa is one of the most affected goods. This paper estimates the effects of international...

Specialization in labor-intensive export crops, such as organic cocoa, can exacerbate gender inequality if production and revenues fall under men's control and the additional labor burden falls on women. However, evidence on the implications for women's empowerment in value chains that combine...

Climate change is intensifying extreme weather events such as droughts and extreme temperatures, threatening agricultural systems. In sub-Saharan Africa, where most farmers rely on rainfed agriculture, the impacts are particularly severe. Agroforestry practices have the potential to provide a...

Climate change is intensifying extreme weather events such as droughts and extreme temperatures, threatening agricultural systems. In sub-Saharan Africa, where most farmers rely on rainfed agriculture, the impacts are particularly severe. Agroforestry practices have the potential to provide a...

Specialization in labor-intensive export crops, such as organic cocoa, can exacerbate gender inequality if production and revenues fall under men's control and the additional labor burden falls on women. However, evidence on the implications for women's empowerment in value chains that combine...

Voluntary sustainability standards offer potential for sustainable development by improving the livelihoods of smallholder cash crop farmers while conserving biodiversity. However, their overall implications remain poorly understood, as studies have mostly focused on assessing their effects on...

Biodiversity loss is recognised as one of the top risks that humanity is facing. The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 highlights the need to better integrate biodiversity considerations into decision-making, and commits to the development of methods to measure the environmental footprint of...

The study applied the newly developed Non-linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) model by Shin et al. on annual data for Ghana from 1970 to 2019. Evidence of a long-run asymmetric cointegration relationship exists between cashew nuts exports, cocoa beans exports, and economic growth....

The COVID-19 pandemic generated diverse impacts and responses in agricultural value chains worldwide. Cocoa is a key crop for Ecuadorian exports, and the analysis of effects the pandemic had on value chain actors contributes to the understanding of their individual capacities to coping with a...

This paper identifies several governance factors that enable economic upgrading and the link between economic and social upgrading /downgrading of smallholders and Abusa sharecroppers in Ghana's cocoa value chain (GCVC). The findings are based on qualitative interviews and focus group...

Voluntary sustainability standards offer potential for sustainable development by improving the livelihoods of smallholder cash crop farmers while conserving biodiversity. However, their overall implications remain poorly understood, as studies have mostly focused on assessing their effects on...

Poverty is a rural phenomenon due to the dominance of subsistence farming in rural communities. This study compares the estimates of unidimensional and multidimensional methodologies to analyse the factors that influence the poverty levels of cocoa farming households predominantly in rural...

In the global cocoa-chocolate chain, sustainability certification became the most widely applied industry tool to respond to sustainability challenges, such as extreme poverty among cocoa producers, and related issues of child labor and deforestation. This contribution analyzes how...

Cocoa farmers in Côte d'Ivoire face precarious livelihoods. Low farm-gate prices that are a fraction of the world market price compel land-extensive farming practices that perpetuate a cycle of poverty and environmental degradation. This paper seeks to understand the drivers of the low...

Purpose This paper aims to assess how cocoa supply chain companies disclose sustainable development goals (SDGs) information in their sustainability reports. This assessment highlights strategic aspects of sustainable supply chain management and reveals leveraging sustainability points in the...

This study presents an extensive analysis of the research landscape concerning the application of computational and mathematical techniques in cocoa farming from 2000 to 2020. The methodology comprises a two-stage process: a bibliometric analysis of 1,886 peer-reviewed documents and a...

Due to various health issues connected to the use of pesticides, cleaner production is now necessary for the cocoa sector. The health of people is negatively impacted by the residues left in cocoa beans through a variety of active pesticide components, solvents, and other pollutants. Whereas, in...

Most cocoa is grown by smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend largely on the income from cocoa. Today, cocoa production must increasingly comply with social and environmental requirements as the worldwide demand for sustainably produced cocoa is growing steadily. There is, however,...

Cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire face precarious livelihoods. Low farm-gate prices that are a fraction of the world market price compel land-extensive farming practices that perpetuate a cycle of poverty and environmental degradation. This paper seeks to understand the drivers of the low...

While many studies analyzed effects of sustainability standards - such as Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance - on smallholder farmers in developing countries, most did not sufficiently account for systematic differences between certified and non-certified farmers. Certified farmers are typically...

This paper aims to analyze how the prevalence of COVID-19 infection has affected the adoption of the contact-confirming application in Japan and how network externalities have emerged in the diffusion process. Japan's COVID-19 contact-confirming application (COCOA), launched on June 19, 2020,...

Studies on involuntary pension participation in general and among farmers, in particular, are scanty. Therefore, this paper aims at investigating cocoa farmers' awareness of pension schemes as well as assessing their willingness to participate in a cocoa pension scheme. A sample of 450 cocoa...

This study aims at developing econometric models to manage the price risk of Dry and Wet Cocoa beans with the help of ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) and VAR (Vector Auto Regressive). The monthly price of Cocoa beans is collected for the period starting from April 2009 to March...

Several methods are used to evaluate competitiveness, but the non-inclusion of quality measures, despite their importance in international product markets, gives less credence to such assessments. This study evaluates export competitiveness in the cocoa sector from the context of pesticide...

Cocoa is one of the essential commodities that contribute significantly to the Indonesian economy. As the third largest cocoa-producing country in the world, Indonesia is facing competition from Ghana, a global cocoa-producing country which is relatively similar to Indonesia in terms of...

ABSTRACT CONTEXT Global cocoa production is largely concentrated in West Africa where over 70% of cocoa is produced. Here, cocoa farming is largely a rain-fed, low-input system with low average yields, which are expected to reduce due to climate change. With increasing demand, there is a need to...

Cocoa plantations (Theobroma cacao) are suggested as agroforestry crops that promote biodiversity conservation. Nonetheless, the role of land-use history on the taxonomic and functional diversity of trees remains poorly explored. In this study, we assessed the effect of two management intensity...

In the context of persisting sustainability challenges in the Global Cocoa-Chocolate Chain (GCCC), sustainability certification gained momentum as a major industry response. While much research has been undertaking regarding effects of certification schemes on farming practices and farmers'...