5 - Changing Farming Practices

Summary

Chapter 5 draws on the survey data to show how private standards are implemented in the field. It introduces three avenues through which standards may address different definitions of sustainability: to drive sustainable intensification, to shift time horizons backward, or to act as payments for social and ecosystem services. It then evaluates standards’ success by evaluating a range of production practices in each category. It shows that particularly industry-friendly standards encourage farmers to intensify their production, with moderate success, but that simultaneous decreases in input use are rarer. Improvements in practices that encourage farmers to make short-term investments for longer-term gains in terms of health or farm resilience can be observed, but often depend on outside financial support. Finally, the chapter finds very few improvements in practices that constitute long-term opportunity costs, for two reasons: one, over time many standards have lowered the stringency of their requirements for high-opportunity-cost practices such as the maintenance of permanent shade cover. Two, even when rules are binding (e.g., minimum wage laws), they are not always followed.