Op weg naar duurzame voeding en landbouw: een empirische analyse van het keuzegedrag van consumenten en kleine boeren

Food connects us all. Both through the production and consumption of food we interact as society with our environment. Food production and consumption shape our livelihood strategies, the natural landscape and ecological and human health. Unfortunately, many environmental and social sustainability challenges remain to be addressed to arrive at more sustainable food and agricultural systems. This thesis takes a micro-economic approach in analyzing individual economic decision making of both consumers in the Global North and smallholders in the Global South in order to support policy development towards a more sustainable food and agricultural system. It adopts an explicitly dual perspective of both consumers and producers, and Global North and Global South relationships since environmental and social challenges vary according to their spatial context, from geographically different, evolving food demands to the environmental impacts of intensive agriculture and challenges of deforestation and land degradation in many poor and highly populated areas. The first part of this thesis investigates the future role of food sustainability labels in order to induce the much needed switch to sustainable food consumption patterns and expand the green/social product market at the expense of the conventional market. Chapter 2 tests how the current effectiveness and use of eco-labels can be stimulated through the provision of more complete environmental information communicated via a more intuitive eco-label design, a graded eco-label. We find that introducing the possibility to compare the environmental performance of food products in a cognitively easy way increases the eco-friendliness of consumers’ food baskets. Chapter 3 studies whether ethical labels trigger the same value as the value consumers put on the underlying ethical label characteristics and tries to understand which ethical attributes have a higher possibility to influence consumer behavior. We observe that the current label does not entirely capture the preferences that respondents have for the underlying label characteristics and that consumers’ willingness-to-pay is highest for attributes where the socially responsible element benefits humans. The second purpose of this thesis is to shed light on how the inclusion of smallholder preferences can support the development of more community-supported and inclusive policies for livelihood improvements, ecosystem protection, and contract/certification design. Of particular interest is the relative importance smallholder farmers attach to different attributes of sustainable certification programs such as Fair Trade since the current ambiguous impact of certification schemes may partly be attributed to the difference between Northern-driven standards and the preferences of smallholder farmers in the South. We find that smallholder rice farmers in Benin prefer contracts with fewer requirements (domestic contract) but contract benefits can outweigh the costs related to these requirements in the case of Fair Trade contracts. This does not hold for Fair Trade contracts with organic standards. In Chapter 5, we investigate whether preventive resettlement can be a community-supported strategy to protect the livelihoods of agricultural households and the local ecosystem services in Eastern Uganda from severe environmental degradation. Given that many of the former resettlement policy attempts originate from a top-down decision process ignoring the diversity and complexity of local agricultural, social and cultural conditions and ecosystems, we find that taking smallholders’ preferences into account can significantly increase future support. Besides, and we identify which program and policy design attributes are essential for a successful preventive resettlement. Our work highlights that food sustainability labels need to become more performant if they want to induce a significant shift in consumer behavior towards more sustainable and less resource-intensive choices. Besides, taking smallholders’ preferences into account has the potential for policies to become more supported by local communities and programs to be better tailored to smallholders’ needs while diminishing the current view that many of these actions stem from Northern dominated discourses instead of originating from a mutual interest. We hope that this thesis can motivate NGOs, companies and policy makers to match their current policies and programs against our results in order to strengthen their sustainable food, agricultural and land use strategies in the Global North and in the Global South.status: publishe