While we expected to find a homogeneous positive effect of
standards for richer farmers, i.e., the farmers beyond the median
consumption level, our findings surprisingly show that the
wealthiest farmers (top 15%) do not gain from standards. This
finding illustrates that standards are not as useful to the
wealthiest farmers with an established market position as to
the middle-class farmers. Clearly, the specificities of cultural
and business environment are successfully employed by the
richest farmers to circumvent the requirements for standards.
Our impact estimates do not include indirect distributional
effects such as general equilibrium effects via the labor market.
Therefore, while we can only infer that standards are directly
beneficial for the upper middle-class, we cannot conclude that
the poorest farms are, or will be, marginalized. Further, our
analysis does not allow a fine-tuned evaluation of the kinds
of interpersonal and business relationships that can be especially
conducive to participating in high-value export sector
and benefiting from standards. Such analysis could potentially
include surveying farmers, processing companies, and exporters.
Further research comprising repeated surveys would be
needed to look into long-term effects of standard adoption
among small-scale farmers.