Book contents
- Selling Sustainability Short?
- Organizations and the Natural Environment
- Selling Sustainability Short?
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Dilemma of Effective Private Governance
- 3 Defining the Goal of a Sustainable Coffee Sector
- 4 Changing the Market
- 5 Changing Farming Practices
- 6 Designing Effective Private Institutions
- 7 Interacting with Public Institutions
- 8 Conclusions
- Book part
- References
- Index
5 - Changing Farming Practices
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2020
- Selling Sustainability Short?
- Organizations and the Natural Environment
- Selling Sustainability Short?
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Dilemma of Effective Private Governance
- 3 Defining the Goal of a Sustainable Coffee Sector
- 4 Changing the Market
- 5 Changing Farming Practices
- 6 Designing Effective Private Institutions
- 7 Interacting with Public Institutions
- 8 Conclusions
- Book part
- References
- Index
Summary
Chapter 5 draws on the survey data to show how private standards are implemented in the field. It introduces three avenues through which standards may address different definitions of sustainability: to drive sustainable intensification, to shift time horizons backward, or to act as payments for social and ecosystem services. It then evaluates standards’ success by evaluating a range of production practices in each category. It shows that particularly industry-friendly standards encourage farmers to intensify their production, with moderate success, but that simultaneous decreases in input use are rarer. Improvements in practices that encourage farmers to make short-term investments for longer-term gains in terms of health or farm resilience can be observed, but often depend on outside financial support. Finally, the chapter finds very few improvements in practices that constitute long-term opportunity costs, for two reasons: one, over time many standards have lowered the stringency of their requirements for high-opportunity-cost practices such as the maintenance of permanent shade cover. Two, even when rules are binding (e.g., minimum wage laws), they are not always followed.
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- Selling Sustainability Short?The Private Governance of Labor and the Environment in the Coffee Sector, pp. 125 - 185Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020