Decoupling Standards from Practice: The Impact of In-House Certifications on Coffee Farms’ Environmental and Social Conduct

In this paper we investigate whether coffee farms that have been granted in-house socio-environmental certification from a global buyer, display better social and environmental conduct compared to non-certified farms. We perform an econometric analysis using data from an original cross-country survey covering 575 farms in various regions of Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico. We find that farms that have been granted in-house...