A new sustainability model for measuring changes in power and access in global commodity chains: through a smallholder lens

Benjamin Neimark,Hayley Alter,Sarah Osterhoudt,Adrian Gradinar

doi:10.1057/s41599-018-0199-0

Benjamin Neimark, Hayley Alter + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0199-0

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Abstract

High-value agricultural commodities face substantial economic, environmental and social sustainability challenges. As a result, commodity industries are adopting sustainable supply- and value-chain models to make production more efficient, traceable and risk-averse. These top-down models often focus on giving higher prices to smallholder producers. While an important component of sustainability, this focus on farm-gate prices has shown mixed results in part because they are less effective in highlighting the asymmetrical power relationships and the socio-economic and ecological complexity in high-value commodity production. Here, we use a novel method to measure and visualise changes in smallholder power in Madagascar’s northeast ‘vanilla triangle’—home to about 80% of the world’s high quality vanilla. Our results reveal the paradox that during the recent price surge an overall increase in smallholders’ multi-dimensional power to access economic benefits was accompanied by a decrease in many other equally important measures of sustainability. This illustrates how effective models for understanding global sustainable commodity chains should incorporate smallholders' perspectives that often emphasise complexity and uncertainty, and which aims to increase power and access for producers across both high and low price points.

Highlights

High-value agricultural commodities face substantial economic, environmental and social sustainability challenges
Moves beyond conceptualising power, providing a unique applied model that both measures and visualises changes to smallholder power as a lens for assessing sustainability. This approach is attractive for its analytic ability, which begins with smallholder perspectives on various multidimensional factors that affect sustainability in diverse ways
The factors placed into eight categories or ‘access mechanisms’, which Ribot and Peluso (2003) define as the ‘means, process and relations’ which facilitate the capture of benefits from resource commercialisation (Ribot and Peluso, 2003)

Summary

Introduction

High-value agricultural commodities face substantial economic, environmental and social sustainability challenges. Our results reveal the paradox that during the recent price surge an overall increase in smallholders’ multi-dimensional power to access economic benefits was accompanied by a decrease in many other important measures of sustainability This illustrates how effective models for understanding global sustainable commodity chains should incorporate smallholders' perspectives that often emphasise complexity and uncertainty, and which aims to increase power and access for producers across both high and low price points. Moves beyond conceptualising power, providing a unique applied model that both measures and visualises changes to smallholder power as a lens for assessing sustainability This approach is attractive for its analytic ability, which begins with smallholder perspectives on various multidimensional factors (e.g., new technologies, security and customary land tenure) that affect sustainability in diverse ways. We make these variables explicit and highly adaptable to other commodities so that future sustainability initiatives can do more to recognise their role and dynamism

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Results