Service provision by agri-cooperatives engaged in high value markets

This note presents a practical approach by which cooperatives strengthen their ability to deliver impactful and financially sustainable services. In doing so, it recognises the challenges faced by cooperatives to design services that both meet the different needs of members and are financially sustainable

Fairtrade cocoa in Ghana: taking stock and looking ahead

Some of the global chocolate industry's biggest players, such as Ferrero, Mars, and Hershey, have expressed their commitment to achieve a sustainable cocoa sector by the year 2020. As the world's second largest producer of cocoa, Ghana is also interested in moving towards sustainable cocoa production. Voluntary standards systems, such as Fairtrade, play an important role in providing independent third-party evidence of progress towards sustainability. Fairtrade does so by offering a framework for producers and buyers to engage in more equitable business relations, with reduced price risks for farmers and opportunities for cooperative and community development through investments enabled by the Fairtrade premium. Over the past years, Fairtrade has significantly advanced in Ghana's cocoa sector. Between 2009 and 2014, annual volumes of Fairtrade cocoa produced in the country increased from 481 MT to 54,600 MT. This impressive growth is linked to the evolution of Kuapa Kokoo as leading cocoa cooperative, and to the creation of numerous new cooperatives that obtained Fairtrade certification over the past few years. Founded in 1993 and Fairtrade certified since 1995, Kuapa Kokoo has grown into the world's largest Fairtrade certified cocoa cooperative. With about 100,000 members, organized into 57 independently registered Societies across 1,280 communities, Kuapa Kokoo offers technical services to its members, purchases cocoa as a Licensed Buying Company (LBC), and provides credit (through an associated credit union with more than 8,000 members). While Kuapa Kokoo continues to produce the lion share (77 percent in the season 2012-13) of Ghana's cocoa sold under Fairtrade terms, the newly founded cooperatives are increasingly contributing relevant volumes of Fairtrade certified cocoa. From 2009 to 2014, the number of Fairtrade cooperatives rose from one (Kuapa Kokoo) to 11, and the share of cocoa with the Fairtrade label increased from less than 1 percent to 6.1 percent of national production. In 2014, Ghana was the world's largest producer of cocoa sold under Fairtrade terms with a market share of 38 percent (followed by Côte d'Ivoire with a share of 30 percent). As Fairtrade expands in Ghana, important questions arise in relation to the capacity of cocoa cooperatives and farmers to benefit from Fairtrade certification; and with respect to impactful ways for Fairtrade and partners to engage with these resource-poor stakeholders in response to the constraints they face at the beginning of the value chain. Here we offer insights into these questions by exploring the overall context in which Fairtrade operates in Ghana, as well as the capacities of four recently established Fairtrade-certified cocoa cooperatives and their members. The latter's organization into cooperatives was facilitated by NGOs and cocoa buyers with the explicit goal of linking them to Fairtrade markets. Data are derived from a baseline study commissioned by Fairtrade Africa, including a household survey among 322 randomly selected members from four Fairtrade-certified cocoa cooperatives with a total membership of roughly 5,000

Service provision by agri-cooperatives engaged in high value markets

Markets for agricultural products with special quality, environmental, and social attributes can provide a profitable outlet for poor farmers in developing countries. However, participation in high value markets requires that farmers commit to deliver pre-identified volumes on time and in the required form and quality – a tall order in many cases. Agri-cooperatives play an important role in linking farmers to these markets; they forge business relations with distant buyers, realise economies of scale in processing and marketing, and provide advisory and other services to help their members respond to buyer demands. Examples of these services include technical assistance, training, and input and credit provision. This note presents a practical approach by which cooperatives strengthen their ability to deliver impactful and financially sustainable services. In doing so, it recognises the challenges faced by cooperatives to design services that both meet the different needs of members and are financially sustainable. Too often cooperative services are supported by external actors with no clear vision of how to continue once project support terminates, leading to disrupted service offerings for members, and fragmented learning processes for cooperatives and their partners. Innovation is urgently needed in how services are designed, how they are implemented, and cost recovery mechanisms. At the heart of the approach lies a focus on joint learning among stakeholders – cooperatives, their business partners, government agencies, and non-government organisations (NGOs) – to better tackle the complexity inherent in the provision of effective services to poor farmers

Baseline for assessing the impact of Fairtrade certification on cocoa farmers and cooperatives in Ghana

Peer Revie

Baseline for assessing the impact of fairtrade certification on cocoa farmers and cooperatives in Côte d’Ivoire

Report commissioned by Fairtrade Africa and Fairtrade International. World Agroforestry Centre, Nairobi, Kenya. Farms-Forests-LandscapesIn 2014, Fairtrade International, Fairtrade Africa, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and Bioversity International initiated a collaboration for the development of a multidimensional baseline on small-scale cocoa farmers and their cooperatives in West Africa. The baseline is expected to provide a fuller understanding of the current situation for Fairtrade cocoa production and marketing as well as provide the foundation for rigorous assessment of outcomes and impacts of Fairtrade certification on cocoa cooperatives and smallholder households in West Africa in the future. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the two largest Fairtrade cocoa producers in West Africa, provide about 68 percent of the cocoa that is sold under Fairtrade terms in global markets. In 2013, the year this study was commissioned, the volume of Fairtrade cocoa sold from West Africa reached 133 400 tonnes, involving 71 cooperatives and producer associations and 138 800 farmers. Most of this cocoa originated from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. The rapid growth in the number of cocoa-producing organizations joining the Fairtrade system in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana provides a unique opportunity to build a baseline on Fairtrade cocoa producers in West Africa for future monitoring and impact assessment. This report focuses on the Fairtrade cocoa baseline for Côte d’Ivoire (a similar report is available for Ghana). It describes the conceptual framework and methods used in the design of the baseline, followed by an assessment of the context in Côte d’Ivoire. Key features of the baseline data at the cooperative and household levels are covered in detail. The report concludes with some recommendations to Fairtrade for expanding Fairtrade International in Côte d’Ivoire and for follow-up actions for future baseline work

Rethinking rights and interests of local communities in REDD+ designs: lessons learnt from current forest tenure systems in Cameroon

It is increasingly becoming clear that reforms based on the claims of local forest communities regarding the right to natural resources will be needed to adequately address issues of sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa. The current institutional and policy frameworks of Cameroon and other SSA countries have bestowed exclusive land tenure rights to the State, while curtailing access of local farmers to forest and forest-based resources on which they depend for a living. It is therefore unlikely that successful forest conservation and implementation of REDD+ can be possible without recognition and enforcement of customary tenure. This paper aimed to sense smallholders' perceptions on rights and risks in the current forestry policy arena linked with the climate change debate in Cameroon. Using semistructured questionnaires and focus group discussions about 7 key informants and 66 community forest users were investigated about the current tenure systems and the risks of related conflicts. Findings from the field provide empirical evidence on the sources of conflict. Based on failures and positive elements of community forestry, the lessons learnt could enrich the on-going REDD safeguard debates and serve as guiding milestones towards the effectiveness of this initiative across the country and the continent.</jats:p

Towards Improving the Reliability of Live Migration Operations in Openstack Clouds

RÉSUMÉ Grâce au succès de la virtualisation, les solutions infonuagiques sont aujourd’hui présentes dans plusieurs aspects de nos vies. La virtualisation permet d’abstraire les caractéristiques d’une ma- chine physique sous forme d’instances de machines virtuelles. Les utilisateurs finaux peuvent alors consommer les ressources de ces machines virtuelles comme s’ils étaient sur une machine physique. De plus, les machines virtuelles en cours d’exécution peuvent être migrées d’un hôte source (généralement hébergé dans un centre de données) vers un autre hôte (hôte de destination, qui peut être hébergé dans un centre de données différent), sans perturber les services. Ce processus est appelé migration en temps réel de machine virtuelles. La migration en temps réel de machine virtuelles, est un outil puissant qui permet aux administrateurs de système infonuagiques d’équilibrer les charges dans un centre de données ou encore de déplacer des applications dans le but d’améliorer leurs performances et–ou leurs fiabilités. Toutefois, si elle n’est pas planifiée soigneusement, cette opération peut échouer. Ce qui peut entraîner une dégradation significative de la qualité de service des applications concernées et même parfois des interruptions de services. Il est donc extrêmement important d’équiper les administrateurs de systèmes infonuagiques d’outils leurs permettant d’évaluer et d’améliorer la performance des opérations de migration temps réel de machine virtuelles. Des efforts ont été réalisées par la communauté scientifique dans le but d’améliorer la fiabilité de ces opérations. Cependant, à cause de leur complexité et de la nature dynamique des environnements infonuagiques, plusieurs migrations en temps réel de machines virtuelles échouent encore. Dans ce mémoire, nous nous appuyons sur les prédictions d’un modèle de classification (Random Forest) et sur des politiques générées par un processus de décision markovien (MDP), pour décider du moment propice pour une migration en temps réel de machine virtuelle, et de la destination qui assurerait un succès a l’opération. Nous réalisons des études de cas visant à évaluer l’efficacité de notre approche. Les défaillances sont simulées dans notre environnement d’exécution grâce à l’outils DestroyStack. Les résultats de ces études de cas montrent que notre approche permet de prédire les échecs de migration avec une précision de 95%. En identifiant le meilleur moment pour une migration en temps réel de machine virtuelle (grâce aux modèles MDP), en moyenne, nous sommes capable de réduire le temps de migration de 74% et la durée d’indisponibilité de la machine virtuelle de 21%.----------ABSTRACT Cloud computing has become commonplace with the help of virtualization as an enabling technology. Virtualization abstracts pools of compute resources and represents them as instances of virtual machines (VMs). End users can consume the resources of these VMs as if they were on a physical machine. Moreover, the running VMs can be migrated from one node (Source node; usually a data center) to another node (destination node; another datacenter) without disrupting services. A process known as live VM migration. Live migration is a powerful tool that system administrators can leverage to, for example, balance the loads in a data center or relocate an application to improve its performance and–or reliability. However, if not planned carefully, a live migration can fail, which can lead to service outage or significant performance degradation. Hence, it is utterly important to be able to assess and forecast the performance of live migration operations, before they are executed. The research community have proposed models and mechanisms to improve the reliability of live migration. Yet, because of the scale, complexity and the dynamic nature of cloud environments, live migration operations still fail. In this thesis, we rely on predictions made by a Random Forest model and scheduling policies generated by a Markovian Decision Process (MDP), to decide on the migration time and destination node of a VM, during a live migration operation in OpenStack. We conduct a case study to assess the effectiveness of our approach, using the fault injection framework DestroyStack. Results show that our proposed approach can predict live migration failures with and accuracy of 95%. By identifying the best time for live migration with MDP models, in average, we can reduce the live migration time by 74% and the downtime by 21%

Deep Learning Model Reuse in the HuggingFace Community: Challenges, Benefit and Trends

The ubiquity of large-scale Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) is on the rise, sparking interest in model hubs, and dedicated platforms for hosting PTMs. Despite this trend, a comprehensive exploration of the challenges that users encounter and how the community leverages PTMs remains lacking. To address this gap, we conducted an extensive mixed-methods empirical study by focusing on discussion forums and the model hub of HuggingFace, the largest public model hub. Based on our qualitative analysis, we present a taxonomy of the challenges and benefits associated with PTM reuse within this community. We then conduct a quantitative study to track model-type trends and model documentation evolution over time. Our findings highlight prevalent challenges such as limited guidance for beginner users, struggles with model output comprehensibility in training or inference, and a lack of model understanding. We also identified interesting trends among models where some models maintain high upload rates despite a decline in topics related to them. Additionally, we found that despite the introduction of model documentation tools, its quantity has not increased over time, leading to difficulties in model comprehension and selection among users. Our study sheds light on new challenges in reusing PTMs that were not reported before and we provide recommendations for various stakeholders involved in PTM reuse.Comment: Accepted by IEEE SANER 202