Petits producteurs, systèmes de certification et normes privées : Le système est-il rentable?

La certification des produits agricoles (certification agriculture biologique, commerce équitable, etc.) est souvent vue comme la source d'une multitude d'avantages pour les petits exploitants. Parmi ceux-ci, on note une réduction de la pauvreté, une baisse des répercussions sur l'environnement, et la réalisation de la sécurité alimentaire. Cette vaste synthèse de 270 études présente une analyse des bénéfices, mais aussi des coûts, de tels projets de certification. Elle démontre principalement que la décision d'investir doit être basée sur de solides principes économiques. Avec une présentation et une argumentation claires, cet ouvrage fournit également des recommandations pour améliorer le secteur de la certification et ses retombées sur les petits exploitants

Small-scale farmers, certification schemes and private standards: Is there a business case?

Certification of agricultural products (organic certification, Fairtrade etc.) is often expected to provide a wide array of benefits for small-scale farmers. These include poverty alleviation, reduced environmental impact and food safety. This wide-ranging synthesis of 270 studies presents an analysis of the benefits – but also the costs – of such schemes. Crucially it demonstrates that the decision to invest must be based on sound economic principles. Clearly laid out and argued, the text also provides recommendations to improve the certification business case and impact on smallholders

Designing and evaluating support programmes in Lower and Middle Income countries : A handbook for Martin Bauer Group

This handbook provides guidance to Martin Bauer Group to design, monitor and evaluate support programmes within their tea and botanicals supply chains

A Characterization of Eventual Byzantine Agreement

: We investigate eventual Byzantine agreement (EBA) in the crash and omission failure modes. The emphasis is on characterizing optimal EBA protocols in terms of the states of knowledge required by the processors in order to attain EBA. It is well known that common knowledge among the nonfaulty processors is a necessary and sufficient condition for attaining simultaneous Byzantine agreement (SBA). We define a new variant that we call continual common knowledge, and use it to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for attaining EBA. Using our characterization, we provide a technique that allows us to start with any EBA protocol and convert it to an optimal EBA protocol using a two-step process. An early version of this work appeared in the Proceedings of the Ninth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 1990. y Much of this work was carried out while the author was at the IBM Almaden Research Center. IBM's support is gratefully acknowledged. The work was als..

Organic produce from the Republic of South Africa : exploring the conditions for enhancing trade in organic vegetables, fruit and wine

Conditions for enhancing the trade in organic products between the Netherlands and the Republic of South Africa were assessed by means of a SWOT analysis, based on information acquired through interviews and desk research. There is a large potential to enhance the trade in organic products between the two countries, although the following issues need to be addressed: the finalisation of the RSA legislation on organic production (which will enable large enough volumes to be produced and traded), skills development and the presence of an effective platform for organic production in the RS