Formalization through contracts: Implications for power in smallholder cocoa supply chains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, accounting for the majority of global cocoa production, exemplify the challenges of addressing environmental sustainability and social equity in informal agricultural supply chains. In this paper, we explore the implications of contractual relationships at the ’first mile,’ where smallholder cocoa farmers first market their product. Our analysis is motivated by the European Union’s Deforestation-free Regulation (EUDR), which aims to eliminate deforestation from global supply chains and is likely to accelerate contract formalization within the cocoa sector. Using in-depth case studies of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, we examined both formal and informal contracts, supported by 107 in-person interviews, to understand how these relationships shape smallholder agency and power dynamics. Formal contracts, as manifested through certification, offer certain structured benefits and are often viewed as a pathway to sustainable cocoa production. However, our findings reveal that they may constrain farmer agency by limiting flexibility in buyer selection and amplifying existing inequalities. Conversely, informal contracts, though opaque, appear to provide smallholders with greater negotiating power and autonomy at the first mile. These findings raise critical questions about the trade-offs inherent in formalization and highlight the need for nuanced policy approaches to achieve equitable and sustainable outcomes in global supply chains.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".