Model for Managing Economic Sustainability in Small-Scale Cacao Producers

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In Huila, Colombia, small cacao producers (Theobroma cacao L) carry out their productive activities using traditional agroforestry practices, within an economic environment of globalization and free market. However, despite having a centuries-old cacao culture, cacao production systems show evidence of not being economically sustainable and may lose their function in the long term. The purpose of this article is to present the research findings to formulate a methodological model that ensures economic sustainability for cacao production systems, conducted at the Universidad Surcolombiana. The proposed new methodological model is based on calculating eleven indicators of financial sustainability for the cacao system, covering production, management, and marketing approaches and their subsequent synthesis into five indices, using techniques for standardization, weighting, and aggregation of indicators. The empirical results obtained through surveys of 228 cacao producers and 13 experts served as the basis for deriving economic sustainability indices, which reveal the heterogeneity in the management of cacao production systems and classify them into five groups. It is concluded that 6.58% of the plantations have very low sustainability, 22.81% have low sustainability, 47.37% are moderately sustainable, 21.93% have high sustainability, and 1.32% have very high sustainability. It also identifies an opportunity to increase the productivity of the cacao system in Huila by 60%.