The role of third party certification in improving small farmer livelihoods

Between 1.5 and 2 billion of the world's poor are small farmers. In recent years, voluntary certification has become a popular tool for improving their livelihoods. The success of the Fairtrade label has inspired hundreds of other sustainable-sourcing schemes, and certified products are increasingly available in mainstream retail outlets. Recent impact studies, however, have failed to demonstrate consistent farmer benefits from certification, leading to a debate among practitioners as to whether it is an effective development tool. This paper takes the view that quantitative variance studies pose the wrong question: they implicitly ask whether certification helps farmers on average. Instead, this paper assumes that certification is sometimes effective and sometimes ineffective, and asks when and how potential benefits can be realized. In doing so, the study takes a process approach, examining events as they unfold in four in-depth case studies based in part on participant-observer research. The theories that emerge from these exploratory cases are then refined based on interviews with key informants and analysis of secondary case studies. Findings are that certification faces different challenges when driven from the bottom of the supply chain upwards versus from the top of the supply chain downwards, and that a recent shift toward the latter has resulted in pressure to certify farmers efficiently but may place less emphasis on whether farmers truly benefit from the certification. The research further points to certification's value as a niche strategy, i.e. for addressing the needs of some small farmers and some products, but its inappropriateness as a mainstream approach, i.e. for all smallholders or all products. To work more broadly toward poverty alleviation, some of the key elements of certification and its common co-investments may be adopted, but not necessarily in the context of certification.