Agricultural Information's Impact on the Adaptive Capacity of Ghana's Smallholder Cocoa Farmers

Ghanaian smallholders grow one quarter of the world's cocoa, but climate change, individual extreme weather events, such as droughts, as well as deforestation increasingly threaten cocoa production. Pertinent information could bolster adaptive capacity. However, in Ghana's cocoa sector, relevant agricultural information is not available to all farmers, which can exacerbate power asymmetries. This paper focuses on how (i) agricultural and drought-adaptive information and (ii) socio-economic characteristics shape a cocoa farmer's adaptive capacity. We conducted our study in the aftermath of 2015–16's prolonged El Niño-induced drought that negatively impacted the livelihoods of cocoa smallholders across Ghana. In 48 semi-structured interviews and 12 focus groups, we asked smallholders how they responded to the drought to decipher how adaptive capacity compares between farmers receiving four different sources of agricultural information, and of diverse socio-economic status. Overall, agricultural information improved cocoa farmers' adaptive capacity compared to those who received no formal agricultural information. Smallholders detailed adaptive techniques that would be accessible to, and thus replicable by, other poorly-resourced cocoa farmers. Shade tree management and income diversification were identified as pertinent adaptive actions. However, we identified a divergence between exposure to agricultural information and its transformation into substantive adaptive action. Additionally, informal information sharing between smallholders represents an underutilized resource by extension programmes. We found that adaptive capacity is also determined by socio-economic characteristics: particularly gender, and to a lesser extent formal education level, proximity to asphalt roads, and land tenure. Finally, we present evidence that framing adaptive techniques in relatable terms that resonate with farmers' immediate livelihood concerns could narrow the adaptation deficit prevalent in Ghana's cocoa sector

Coffee certification in Brazil: compliance with social standards and its implications for social equity

© 2018, The Author(s). This paper addresses the relationship between compliance with social performance criteria (the social outcomes that must be achieved for certification) and procedural (management) criteria and this relationship’s significance for social equity at both farm and wider landscape levels. We consider social performance compliance to be pertinent to farm-level equity, and the relative compliance of small versus large farms to be pertinent to landscape-level equity. Certification’s management requirements are often deemed disproportionately burdensome for small, resource-poor producers, and hence a barrier to landscape-level equity. There is a lack of research examining how management criteria impact the ability of different sized farms to meet certification’s social performance requirements. We analysed 435 certification audits, covering all Brazilian coffee farms that sought Rainforest Alliance certification from 2006 to 2014 inclusive: 80 individual farms and 23 groups of farms. In principle, undergoing group certification permits smallholders to benefit from economies of scale. Our analysis revealed a statistically significant, positive correlation between compliance with procedural (managing sustainability plans) and social performance criteria. This correlation was stronger for groups than individual farms. Group farms’ compliance was statistically equivalent to that of individual farms, suggesting that group certification is achieving its intended purpose of socio-economic levelling of certified farmers. Over time, certified farms’ average compliances improved. Our findings suggest that management requirements play an important role in improving smallholders’ overall social sustainability performance and that group certification may help resource-poor smallholders achieve those requirements. Further work is required to understand causal mechanisms underlying the relationships we present

From Agroforestry to Agroindustry: Smallholder Access to Benefits From Oil Palm in Ghana and the Implications for Sustainability Certification

Oil palm production in Ghana—which is primarily cultivated by smallholders (60%+)—plays an important role in local economies and rural livelihoods. As a multi-functional crop, it is embedded in the everyday life of rural and urban Ghanaians both by individual households and on an industrial level. The sector is currently experiencing a resurgence under Ghana's New Patriotic Party (NPP) rule and is being targeted by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) for yield intensification and increased export production. End goals of these efforts include poverty alleviation, environmentally responsible development efforts, and agricultural diversification in rural areas. We apply Ribot and Peluso's “theory of access” (2003) to assess the barriers and opportunities for smallholder oil palm farmers, and the degree to which these are addressed by RSPO interventions. Our results highlight how Ghanaian smallholders gain many benefits from palm oil production as a source of regular income, a drought-resilient crop, and a source of cooking oil for household use. However, they also report different levels of access to finance, markets, land, and technical support, along with differing views and visions of the oil palm sector's development. The focus of governmental and RSPO initiatives on international trade-based incentives overlooks this diversity and, in particular, the importance of local markets for Ghanaian livelihoods. This poses a threat to women millers and traders, poorer producers, and the local markets they supply who risk losing access to the palm oil supply chain. More generally, these findings illustrate the importance of understanding how markets interact at multiple local to international scales, in order to design interventions that will more equitably reach and benefit local communities

Climate-Smart Cocoa in Ghana: How Ecological Modernisation Discourse Risks Side-Lining Cocoa Smallholders

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) aims to transform and reorient farming systems to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, boost adaptive capacity, and improve productivity while supporting incomes and, ostensibly, food security. In Ghana—the world's second biggest cocoa producer—the cocoa sector is challenged by increasing global cocoa demand, climate change impacts, as well as mounting consumer pressure over cocoa's deforestation. Climate-smart cocoa (CSC) has emerged to address these challenges as well as to improve smallholder incomes. As with CSA more widely, there are concerns that CSC discourses will override the interests of cocoa smallholders, and lead to inequitable outcomes. To better understand if and how the implementation of CSC in Ghana can meet its lofty ambitions, we examine (1) the dominant CSC discourses as perceived by stakeholders, and their reflection in policy and practice, and (2) subsequent implications for cocoa smallholders through an equity lens. Through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with key stakeholders in Ghana's cocoa sector, we find overwhelming consensus for an ecological modernisation discourse with the promise of a “triple win” narrative that simultaneously stops deforestation, supports climate mitigation and adaptation, and increases smallholder livelihoods. Moreover, we find that implementing CSC on the ground has generally converged around “sustainable intensification” and private-sector-led partnerships that aspire to generate a “win-win” for environment and productivity objectives, but potentially at the expense of delivering equitable outcomes that serve smallholders' interests. We find that the success of CSC and the overly-simplistic sustainable intensification narrative is constrained by the lack of clear tree tenure rights, complexities around optimal shade trees levels, potential rebound effects regarding deforestation, and the risks of agrochemical-dependence. More positively, local governance mechanisms such as Ghana's Community Resource Management Area Mechanisms (CREMAs) may give cocoa smallholders a stronger voice to shape policy. However, we caution that the discursive power of dominant private sector actors may risk side-lining equity which could prove detrimental to the long-term wellbeing of Ghana's ~800,000 cocoa smallholders

Coffee certification in Brazil: compliance with social standards and its implications for social equity

This paper addresses the relationship between compliance with social performance criteria (the social outcomes that must be achieved for certification) and procedural (management) criteria, and this relationship’s significance for social equity at both farm and wider landscape levels. We consider farm-level equity to be enhanced by social performance compliance, and landscape-level equity when farms of different sizes (and thus incomes) are equally compliant. Certification’s management requirements are often deemed disproportionately burdensome for small, resource-poor producers, and hence a barrier to landscape-level equity. There is a lack of research examining how management criteria impact the ability of different sized farms to meet certification’s social performance requirements. We analysed 435 certification audits, covering all Brazilian coffee farms that sought Rainforest Alliance certification from 2006 to 2014 inclusive: 80 individual farms and 23 groups of farms. In principle, undergoing group certification permits smallholders to benefit from economies of scale. Our analysis revealed a statistically significant, positive correlation between compliance with procedural (managing sustainability plans) and social performance criteria. This correlation was stronger for groups than individual farms. Group farms’ compliance was statistically equivalent to that of individual farms; suggesting that group certification is achieving its intended purpose of socio-economic leveling of certified farmers. Over time, certified farms’ average compliances improved. These findings suggest that management requirements play an important role in improving smallholders’ overall social-sustainability performance, and that group certification may help resource-poor smallholders achieve those requirements. Further work is required to understand causal mechanisms underlying the relationships we present

From agroforestry to agroindustry: smallholder access to benefits from oil palm in Ghana and the implications for sustainability certification

Oil palm production in Ghana—which is primarily cultivated by smallholders (60%+)—plays an important role in local economies and rural livelihoods. As a multi-functional crop, it is embedded in the everyday life of rural and urban Ghanaians both by individual households and on an industrial level. The sector is currently experiencing a resurgence under Ghana's New Patriotic Party (NPP) rule and is being targeted by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) for yield intensification and increased export production. End goals of these efforts include poverty alleviation, environmentally responsible development efforts, and agricultural diversification in rural areas. We apply Ribot and Peluso's “theory of access” (2003) to assess the barriers and opportunities for smallholder oil palm farmers, and the degree to which these are addressed by RSPO interventions. Our results highlight how Ghanaian smallholders gain many benefits from palm oil production as a source of regular income, a drought-resilient crop, and a source of cooking oil for household use. However, they also report different levels of access to finance, markets, land, and technical support, along with differing views and visions of the oil palm sector's development. The focus of governmental and RSPO initiatives on international trade-based incentives overlooks this diversity and, in particular, the importance of local markets for Ghanaian livelihoods. This poses a threat to women millers and traders, poorer producers, and the local markets they supply who risk losing access to the palm oil supply chain. More generally, these findings illustrate the importance of understanding how markets interact at multiple local to international scales, in order to design interventions that will more equitably reach and benefit local communities

Climate-smart cocoa governance risks entrenching old hegemonies in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana: a multiple environmentality analysis

Smallholders in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana supply over 60% of the cocoa to the $120bn global chocolate industry. Like colonialists and multilateral banks before them, foreign chocolate corporations today attempt to govern the behaviour of smallholders in Ivorian and Ghanaian forests via a recent proliferation of ‘climate-smart’ cocoa (CSC) schemes. In this article, we seek to understand what is new and different – if anything – about contemporary, climate-smart governance of cocoa and forests. To do this, we apply and temporally extend Fletcher's ‘multiple environmentalities’ framework to classify the various techniques by which smallholder behaviour has been steered throughout the history of cocoa and forest governance, comparing the cases of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana by drawing on interviews with 200 smallholders and documentary analysis. This framework parses diverse ‘techniques of government’ used to shape subjects’ behaviour, including: sovereign (imposing laws), disciplinary (internalising norms), neoliberal (constructing material incentives), and liberation (emancipatory self-rule). We show that across all eras and in both countries – despite divergent political economies – smallholder behaviour has been predominantly governed by overlapping neoliberal and sovereign governmentalities, whose legitimacy has increasingly relied on reframing smallholders as environmental subjects. We demonstrate how smallholder voices remain marginalised and argue that corporate-led CSC schemes build upon and re-employ past sovereign powers (e.g., threatening to evict smallholders from protected forests), thus entrenching long-standing power asymmetries and overlooking critical differences between countries. Notably, cross-border corporate governance schemes ignore, and thereby (unwittingly) inflame, Ivorian violence and ethnoreligious strife

Climate-smart cocoa governance risks entrenching old hegemonies in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana: a multiple environmentality analysis

Smallholders in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana supply over 60% of the cocoa to the USD120bn global chocolate industry. Like colonialists and multilateral banks before them, foreign chocolate corporations today attempt to govern the behaviour of smallholders in Ivorian and Ghanaian forests via a recent proliferation of ‘climate-smart’ cocoa (CSC) schemes. In this article, we seek to understand what is new and different – if anything – about contemporary, climate-smart governance of cocoa and forests. To do this, we apply and temporally extend Fletcher’s ‘multiple environmentalities’ framework to classify the various techniques by which smallholder behaviour has been steered throughout the history of cocoa and forest governance, comparing the cases of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana by drawing on interviews with 200 smallholders and documentary analysis. This framework parses diverse ‘techniques of government’ used to shape subjects’ behaviour, including: sovereign (imposing laws), disciplinary (internalising norms), neoliberal (constructing material incentives), and liberation (emancipatory self-rule). We show that across all eras and in both countries – despite divergent political economies – smallholder behaviour has been predominantly governed by overlapping neoliberal and sovereign governmentalities, whose legitimacy has increasingly relied on reframing smallholders as environmental subjects. We demonstrate how smallholder voices remain marginalised and argue that corporate-led CSC schemes build upon and re-employ past sovereign powers (e.g., threatening to evict smallholders from protected forests), thus entrenching long-standing power asymmetries and overlooking critical differences between countries. Notably, cross-border corporate governance schemes ignore, and thereby (unwittingly) inflame, Ivorian violence and ethnoreligious strife

Modelling error evaluation of ground observed vegetation parameters

To verify large-scale vegetation parameter measurements the average value of sampling points from small-scale data are typically used. However, this method undermines the validity of the data due to the difference in scale or an inappropriate number of sampling points. A robust universal error assessment method for measuring ground vegetation parameters is therefore needed. Herein, we simulated vegetation scenarios and measurements by employing a normal distribution function and the Lindbergh-Levi theorem to deduce the characteristics of the error distribution. We found that the small-and large-scale error variation was similar among the theoretically deduced Leaf Area Index (LAI) measurements. Additionally, LAI was consistently normally distributed regardless of which systematic error or accidental error was applied. The difference between observed and theoretical errors was highest in the low-density scenario (7.6% at <3% interval) and was lowest in the high-density scenario (5.5% at <3% interval) while the average ratio between deviation and theoretical error of each scenario was 2.64% (low-density), 2.07% (medium-density) and 2.29% (high-density). Further, the relative difference between theoretical and empirical error was highest in the high-density scenario (20.0% at <1% interval) and lowest in the low-density scenario (14.9% at <1% interval), respectively. These data show the strength of a universal error assessment method and we recommend that existing large-scale data of the study region are used to build a theoretical error distribution. Such prior work in conjunction with the models outlined in this paper could reduce measurement costs and improve the efficiency of conducting ground measurements