#11 What is the effect of environmental standards on agricultural value chains?

Do they help or hinder chances for the Global South to move forward?

Mangos or rice, chocolate or even wood - just to mention a few agricultural products that are heavily exported from several countries in the Global South to the Global North. A growing number of them are grown, harvested and processed in line with environmental standards and labels. These standards are meant to improve environmental conditions. And consumers might think a environment friendly label also improves the social conditions: It just sounds plausible - because whoever cares for the environment also cares for the workers and the small smallholder farmers, right? Well: many certification schemes do consider more dimensions of sustainability - but not all. And there is an increasing evidence that some environmental standards do even worsen the social and economic conditions of firms and farms in the Global South.

In this episode we want to have a look at this evidence. Our moderator Nicolas Martin is discussing this with Aarti Krishnan. She is a development economist working on value chains and green growth at the University of Manchester.

https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/aarti.krishnan-2

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=CS46MiwAAAAJ

Krishnan, A., De Marchi, V., & Ponte, S. (2022). Environmental upgrading and downgrading in global value chains: A framework for analysis. Economic Geography, 1-26.

Krauss, J. E., & Krishnan, A. (2022). Global decisions versus local realities: Sustainability standards, priorities and upgrading dynamics in agricultural global production networks. Global Networks, 22(1), 65-88.