Tanguy Bernard

 

Abstract: This paper investigates the traceability of environmentally and socially sustainable (ESS) certified cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s leading cocoa-producing country. Despite ESS certification schemes, significant information asymmetries persist within the value chain, leaving room for opportunistic behaviors such as side-sourcing, i.e. when conventional cocoa is labeled as certified. We explore reporting discrepancies regarding transactions of allegedly certified cocoa, using survey data from farmers and middlemen, and administrative data provided by cooperatives. We find large discrepancies between volumes declared by farmers and cooperatives across all cooperatives in our sample, indicating widespread side-sourcing. Cooperatives report volumes 123% to 870% higher than farmers’ declarations, while middlemen’s reports closely match farmers’. We further assess the impact of a new digital traceability system (DTS), implemented through a randomized controlled trial, designed to reduce opacity in transactions between farmers and middlemen (and hence, cooperatives). Despite comprehensive training, adoption of the system remained minimal, with less than 3% of transactions digitized in treated sections. Yet, we find that cooperatives engaged in different misreporting practices in their traceability registers depending on treatment intensity: under low-intensity treatment, they inflated reported volumes by creating numerous additional, potentially fraudulent transactions, whereas under intensive monitoring they shifted toward modifying existing records, particularly reported volumes. Our findings demonstrate that digital traceability tools alone are insufficient to address systematic fraud in agricultural certification systems without complementary enforcement mechanisms.

 

 

 

 

– Séminaire organisé par le programme 3 / BSE –

 

 

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