Abstract
There is a blossoming of voluntary certification initiatives for sustainable agro-food products and production processes. With these certification initiatives come traceability in supply chains, to guarantee the sustainability of the products consumed. No systematic analysis exists of traceability systems for sustainability in agro-food supply chains. Hence, the purpose of this article is to analyze the prevalence of four different traceability systems to guarantee sustainability; to identify the factors that determine the kind of traceability systems applied in particular supply chains; and to assess what the emergence of economic and market logics in traceability mean for sustainability. Two conclusions are drawn. Globalizing markets for sustainable agro-food products induces the emergence of book-and-claim traceability systems, but the other three systems (identity preservation, segregation and mass balance) will continue to exist as different factors drive traceability requirements in different supply chains. Secondly, traceability itself is becoming a market driven by economic and market logics, and this may have consequences for sustainability in agro-food supply chains in the future.
Highlights
Over the past decades, increasing globalization in agro-food trade has been paralleled with a growing importance attached to sustainability of products and of the circumstances under which product have been produced
There are () other factors involved in determining the prevalence of a traceability system for a sustainably produced agro-food products in a specific market
The four models of traceability (mass balance, segregation, identity preserved and book and claim) differ in how sustainability certification of a final product is related to the sustainability qualities of production circumstances and products at different stages of the value chain
Summary
Over the past decades, increasing globalization in agro-food trade has been paralleled with a growing importance attached to sustainability of products and of the circumstances under which product have been produced. We see the blossoming of sustainability labels and certification systems in global value chains of food (fish, coffee, tea, cocoa, vegetables, etc.), (bio) fuel/energy (electricity, liquid biofuels) and agro-industrial commodities (timber, cotton, textiles) Most of these labelled and certified products started as niche markets and included only a limited number of producer and consumer countries (as was initially the case for fair trade coffee, and for organic products). We (i) analyze the prevalence of the various systems to trace sustainable products through value chains; (ii) identify the factors that determine which kind of traceability system is applied for different agro-food commodities; and (iii) assess the consequences of emerging trade in sustainability certificates (rather than sustainable products) in value chains.
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