Using a state of the art structural gravity model, we investigate the impact of various (post-)colonial cocoa trading arrangements on the cocoa trade between developing cocoa producer countries and rich industrial cocoa consumer nations in the time period 1951 to 1999. We find that in particular...

The EU Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (Regulation (EU) 2023/1115, hereinafter referred to as 'the Regulation', 'this Regulation', or 'EUDR') introduces obligations to operators and traders relating to the placing or making available on the Union market, and exporting from the Union of...

The EU Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (Regulation (EU) 2023/1115, hereinafter referred to as 'the Regulation', 'this Regulation', or 'EUDR') introduces obligations to operators and traders relating to the placing or making available on the Union market, and exporting from the Union of...

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...

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...

Third-party certification is on the rise in agrifood chains despite the obstacles farmers face in participating in-and compliance with-certification standards with rapidly evolving standards and risky markets. Yet certification schemes claim to enhance smallholder livelihoods, barriers and...

Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) are a popular instrument in corporate social responsibility strategies of food processing and distribution companies. Yet, concerns emerge about companies capitalizing on VSS as a reputation-building and product-differentiation tool without investing in...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

The present paper uses asymmetric cointegration and error-correction modeling where a nonlinear adjustment of the exchange rate yields results that are different than those yielded by linear models. We study cocoa imports for Turkey with advanced ARDL and nonlinear ARDL frameworks. Our findings...

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...

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...

This study empirically explores the dynamic interactions between the European and Indonesian cocoa markets during the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) and the 2011 European debt crisis (EDC) using a battery of time series approaches of cointegration and multivariate Granger causality. The...

Large chocolate manufacturers have committed themselves to only using certifiedcocoa beans and some governments want to increase the share of certified cocoaproducts consumed in their countries. Thus, Voluntary Sustainability Standards(VSSs) become quasi-mandatory for cocoa producers and...

In the past two decades, markets grew to accommodate no less than 435 “eco-labels” or standards such as Organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and UTZ Certified, that claim some aspect of sustainability. They constitute multi-billion dollar markets and the world’s leading food and...

Due to the importance of cocoa in the food industry, there is a greater need to transport this commodity with fewer rejections and damage to quality. Growing in the tropical areas of the world, cocoa beans travel a considerable distance to their main importing destinations located in North...