I’ve spent years working with smallholder farmers across cocoa, rubber, and coconut supply chains in Côte d’Ivoire, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. And one thing I keep seeing: companies invest heavily in getting their suppliers certified, tick the sustainability box, and call it a day. Let’s be honest about why. Most buyers don’t certify suppliers to improve farmers’ lives. They certify to protect themselves. “80% of our suppliers are certified” sounds good in an ESG report. It doesn’t mean a single farmer earned more, diversified their income, or survived a bad season. This logic ultimately undermines itself.
Certification is not a living income strategy. It’s a liability shield.
When you spend years not looking closely to what actually happens at the farm level or in the household — you end up with fewer farmers, producing less, more vulnerable to every shock that comes their way. El Niño. Price collapses. Input cost spikes. The cocoa crisis in Côte d’Ivoire right now — farmgate prices cut by 57% overnight — is exactly that story. A system that was never designed to protect the farmer, and now the farmer has no buffer.
And suddenly the commodity is scarcer and more expensive. And the millions poured into tier-1 supplier certification look like what they always were: unproductive investment. You certified the top of the chain while the problems were brewing at the bottom.
The research recently backs this up. The Farmer Income Lab — a partnership between Mars and Wageningen University — reviewed over 1,500 studies covering 48 common interventions: farmer field schools, input subsidies, certification schemes. Only 3 raised average incomes by more than 50%. Certification alone didn’t make the cut.
As FSG notes, the investment needed to lift a smallholder to a living income far exceeds what certification premiums alone can generate. The gap has to be filled by something else — shared risk between buyers, governments, financial players, and local institutions.
So here’s the uncomfortable reframe: if your sustainability budget follows an 80/20 logic — 80% on certification, audits, and blockchain traceability, 20% on what actually happens on the ground then you have it backwards. There is nothing interesting to trace when the farmer at the other end is broke, exhausted, and switching to another crop.
Which On-the-ground Solutions Can Be Leveraged?
What actually moves the needle is bundling interventions where the farmer lives and works:
- Technical support that sticks, with concrete means to apply newly acquired skills
- Access to affordable finance, making farmers more business-oriented
- Income diversification, not monoculture dependency
- Direct market linkages that cut out predatory intermediaries and valorize quality
This is the model we’ve been building at Ksapa. Across our SUTTI programs, we work at the intersection of agronomy, market access, and social performance — not as separate workstreams, but as an integrated offer to the farmers and cooperatives we support. The starting point is always the same: what does this household actually need to become resilient, not just compliant?
We can do better. The tools exist. What’s missing is the willingness to stop pouring money into optics and start investing in the farmer’s resilience — because without it, there’s nothing left to certify.
Hatim Issoufaly has for the past 15 years been passionated about strengthening the capacity of local development actors to achieve impact at large scale. Structuring resilient supply chains through innovative agronomic models and social structuration, enabled him to increase the net revenue of farmers while improving the quality and traceability of high risk commodities.
Hatim speaks French, English, Spanish, Bahasa Indonesia and Hindi. He holds a Master Degree in Comparative agricultural system (Agro Paristech) and a Tropical Agriculture Master degree from Montpellier School of Agronomy.
