Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Companies trading agricultural commodities use environmental assessments to monitor their environmental performance and guide sustainability initiatives that help reducing negative impacts in their value chains. Current methods simplify the assessment of these impacts by leaving behind the effect that agricultural commodity production has beyond the farm as a consequence of land use interactions with competing economic activities. The landscape composition where a crop is cultivated, the policy regulations in place and the market dynamics are some of the factors that determine the type, scale and location of the impacts of the production of agricultural commodities.
Agricultural commodity networks are increasingly globalized but the understanding of these factors playing at local and global scales, their drivers and effects is at its infancy. Using cocoa (one of the top five deforestation-risk commodities in the world) as illustrative case study, my research aims to deepen the understanding of the drivers and the impacts caused by globalized commodity networks.
My Phd will:
- Make a comparative analysis of currently used environmental impact assessment tools in the private sector to evaluate their completeness and limitations in capturing impacts of agriculture commodity production beyond the farm level.
- Analyze the impacts of cocoa production in Ghana beyond the farm while contrasting them with the impacts captured by traditional assessment methods (life cycle assessment). We deploy spatial analysis techniques and land use modelling to evaluate the impact of cocoa production under three potential future scenarios.
- Analyze the market configuration of the global cocoa value chain and the sourcing strategies of cocoa trading corporations to understand the efficacy of voluntary corporate sustainability initiatives in the sector. We analyze the following acknowledged sustainability issues linked to cocoa production: deforestation, forest degradation, climate change, poverty and child labor.
Main photo: Claudia interviewing cocoa farmers during fieldwork in Ivory Coast (credits: Claudia Parra Paitan)
Contact
Claudia Parra Paitan
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Institute for Environmental Studies
[email protected]
De Boelelaan 1087, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
“My research aims to develop more comprehensive assessments of the telecoupled indirect, distant and multi-scale land use impacts of global agricultural commodity chains.”
Claudia Parra Paitan
Publications …
Parra Paitan, C. & P.H. Verburg (2019). Methods to Assess the Impacts and Indirect Land Use Change Caused by Telecoupled Agricultural Supply Chains: A Review. Sustainability 11:1162.
… and more
Claudia’s blog posts
Embracing complexity in the assessment of environmental impacts caused by global food systems