Enhancing smallholder farmer climate resilience in cocoa and banana global food value chains

Abstract

The global food system is a complex socio-ecological system performing the critical service (with varying degrees of success) of nourishing humanity’s food and nutrition needs. This system is under threat from, amongst others, a range of climate related shocks, including extreme weather events as well as more gradual stressors, such as changing rainfall patterns. The impacts of climate related shocks and stressors to the global food system, such as loss of income and hunger, are unequally distributed between food system actors with smallholder farmers (an incredibly diverse yet globally significant grouping) being particularly vulnerable. Increasingly, many smallholder farmers are embedded in global food value chains (GFVCs), producing crops for export, including fruits, vegetables and non-food commodities. GFVCs are international networks of actors that interact at the various stages (production, processing, distribution, retailing and consumption) of the food system. However, little is understood about how farmers engaged in GFVCs are affected by climate shocks and how the impacts are influenced by their participation in a GFVC. Resilience, the ability of a system to cope with shocks and maintain overall function, has emerged as a potentially useful concept for guiding the governance and management of food systems in the face of these evolving threats. Within the broader field of resilience, climate resilience is emerging as a priority topic in smallholder food production in the Global South. This thesis seeks to understand how climate shocks impact smallholders engaged in GFVCs and elicit ways to enhance the climate resilience of the vulnerable actors in these systems. I created three linked objectives for this thesis : (i) Co-define, with stakeholders, “climate resilience” of smallholder farmers in GFVCs. (ii) Assess the climate resilience of smallholder farmers and its determinants in GFVCs. (iii) Assess and explore different opportunities to enhance climate resilience of smallholders in GFVCs. To operationalise these objectives, I investigated two smallholder driven GFVCs, that share many characteristics, such as polarisation of actor power and climate hazard exposure, but also have some key ecological and institutional contrasts. These are the Ghanaian - Swiss cocoa value chain and the Dominican Republic - UK banana value chain. Both of these GFVCs face regular and intensifying climate threats, with a severe shock being experienced in both GFVCs between 2015 and 2017. As a result of the El Niño oscillation in 2015 there was a strong drought experienced by cocoa farmers in Ghana during the 2015-16 production season. Contrastingly, banana farmers in the Dominican Republic were exposed to severe flood damage caused by two consecutive hurricanes, Irma and Maria, in September 2017. These climate shocks are the focus of my thesis. To deliver on the objectives, I adopted (with many crucial collaborations) a four-phase approach: (i) Value chain stakeholder platform establishment, (ii) Characterising climate risks and co-defining climate resilience, (iii) Resilience assessment of smallholder producers in the context of GFVCs, (iv) Exploration of resilience enhancement opportunities. In each value chain, I utilise an overall transdisciplinary research approach, involving multiple methods including; multi-stakeholder workshops, focus groups, value-chain-actor interviews, household surveys, biophysical on farm assessments and satellite remote sensing. Chapter 2 takes the case of the 2015-16 drought shock, to cocoa production in Ghana, to examine whether sustainability certification, namely Organic, UTZ and Rainforest Alliance, can deliver climate resilience for smallholder farmers. In Chapter 3, I again take the case of cocoa producers but move beyond comparison of certification impacts to address the question: What determines the adoption of climate resilience strategies by smallholder farmers? In Chapter 4, taking the Dominican Republic banana case, I ask: What determines the resilience of smallholder farmers embedded in GFVCs to extreme weather events? I address four specific research questions; (i) How are smallholder farmers impacted by hurricane induced flooding? (ii) What actions or strategies do the actors of this GFVC adopt to enhance their climate resilience? (iii) How quickly did farmers recover? and (iv) What determined recovery rates? Across the banana and cocoa value chains, I find that for climate resilience strategies to be effective they must be both generalisable across diverse (even unknown) threats, whilst also incorporating specificity versus key hazards. This is challenged by the fact that farmer agency relating to resilience strategy utilisation is scale-limited, exemplified by them having little power to act at a landscape scale. Moreover, resilience enhancing strategies are more than just the sum of their parts and therefore, both synergistic and antagonistic, interactions must be considered in their design and promotion. In particular, in relation to GFVCs, climate resilience strategies are not, by default, benevolent and important inter-actor tradeoffs occur, such as traders switching sourcing locations in the face of a shock. I find multiple determinants of climate resilience strategy adoption, including land tenure, income generating capacity and farm scale. Relatedly, I find access to markets for alternative agricultural products is key to developing climate resilient multifunctional agricultural systems. Additionally, the sub-national regional context strongly moderates climate resilience strategy adoption and extreme-weather-shock outcomes and, therefore, should be accommodated in policy and programme design. In terms of mechanisms to enhance the climate resilience of smallholders in GFVCs, certification has the potential to modify smallholder climate resilience but underperforms on the uptake of complex versus simple measures because of a strong commodity focus. I find that climate specific training enhances climate resilience strategy uptake but targeting is key to avoid smaller scale farmers being left behind. Spatial planning at a landscape scale, such as zoning using flood risk maps, can enhance climate resilience and should be pursued as a powerful resilience enhancing tool. Overall, participating in GFVCs is a “double-edged sword” for smallholders’ climate resilience and, therefore, cooperation must be enhanced, for example via mechanisms to increase basin-scale collaboration and trader loyalty, so as to reduce the tradeoffs involved.