In analyzing the direct impact of food standards on farmers’
livelihoods, most of the literature has focused on average impacts.
While the average gain from standards is surely interesting,
there is, in our view, a case for believing that the gain is
unevenly distributed across households of different socio-economic
status. First of all, we argue that in rural markets with
credit constraints or high financing costs due to information
asymmetries, a positive impact of standards is only attributable
to farmers in the upper segments of the income or wealth
distribution because of excessive financing costs for the poorer
farmers. This argument is based on findings in previous studies
that show how adoption of standards is to a large extent determined
by households’ endowments of capital, resulting in a
wealth threshold above which application of standards becomes
beneficial (see, e.g., Asfaw et al., 2010b; Kersting &
Wollni, 2012). Similarly, Neven, Odera, Reardon, and Wang