Multiplicidade de padrões voluntários de sustentabilidade na indústria mundial de cacau
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Date
2022-09-16Author
Paes, João Pedro Baptista Viegas de Oliveira
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To address economic and social problems in the production of agricultural commodities around
the world, sustainability standards have emerged establishing objective criteria in order to make
the production in general more sustainable, even fostering international trade through the
standardization of commodity production. However, the rapid proliferation of voluntary
sustainability standards has created problems for producers who seek to comply with the
requirements, since for each sustainability standard there are different criteria to be observed,
generating adequacy and compliance costs, and consequently affecting trade. The work
analyzes eight different standards for the cocoa industry: Rainforest Alliance - 2020 (RA);
Echar PA'LANTE - Colcocoa (EPC); ARSO Sustainable Cocoa (ARSO); Cocoa Horizons -
Barry Callebaut (CHBC); IFOAM Standard (IFOAM); Fairtrade International - Small
Producers Organizations (FI - SPO); Fairtrade International - Small Producers Organizations -
Cocoa (FI-SPOC); Fairtrade International Trader (FIT). Using a theoretical model, the
relationships between standards and how these relationships affect trade were analyzed.
Through the Standard Overlap Index (SOI) and the Heterogeneity Index of Standards (HIS), it
was possible to observe that the standards present low levels of competition, possibly implying
lower transaction costs for compliance and a heterogeneous distribution of overlap levels, with
emphasis on two key standards with high overlap levels in relation to the others: RA and FI -
SPOC. This means that producers who are compliant with these two standards have an easier
time conforming to the others, since requirements overlap to a greater extent. The opposite is
not true for just under half of the standards, which have low overlap levels and would imply
higher compliance costs for producers wanting to comply with RA and FI - SPOC. Finally, the
cocoa market suffers from the effect of the multiplicity of standards and producers incur
transaction costs, especially to comply with standards with more requirements.
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