Do private sustainability standards walk the talk in improving economic and environmental sustainability?

A wide variety of private sustainability standards is spreading in global agri-food sectors, each with their own promises on improving the sustainability of food production and trade. Organic certification is promoted as eco-friendly. Fair-trade claims to provide farmers with a better deal that allows them to improve their lives and to offer consumers a powerful way to reduce poverty through their everyday shopping. Rainforest Alliance claims to ensure the long-term economic health of forest communities through protecting ecosystems, safeguarding the well-being of local communities and improving productivity, and so on. But do they walk the talk? In this study, we analyze the environmental, economic and social implications of a double Fair-trade – Organic (FT-Org) and a triple Utz – Rainforest Alliance – 4C (Utz-RA-4C) smallholder coffee certification scheme in the Mt. Elgon region in Eastern Uganda. We use household- and plot-level socio-economic data from a quantitative survey among 596 farm-households producing coffee on 1,202 plots in combination with plot-level inventory data of a matched sub-sample of 74 coffee plots on tree- and invertebrate-biodiversity and carbon storage. We found that Utz-RA-4C increases coffee yields, labour productivity and coffee incomes but creates little ecological benefits on coffee plots while FT-Org results in higher biodiversity and carbon storage but reduces yield, labour productivity and coffee incomes (despite higher farm-gate prices). Results show that standards which focus most on farmers’ income have the lowest impact on those incomes and that standards which focus most on environmental issues create the least ecological benefits. Invertebrates of the leaf litter layer proved to be valuable indicators of management-induced changesstatus: publishe