Multiplicidade de padrões voluntários de sustentabilidade na indústria mundial de cacau

Abstract

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.