“Oh, it’s so vanilla” is a casual comment one sometimes hears to describe something bland or boring. Yet vanilla is far from boring – and perhaps people in the West take the familiar flavoring for granted. Demand for the spice is traditionally highest in North America and Europe (especially France), but is now growing in Asia, especially Japan.

A recent paper from the FiBL Switzerland demonstrates that organic production systems in the tropics are as profitable as conventional systems. The paper emphasises that organic farming does not solely rely on main cash crops for export to generate income. Associated and rotational crops play a crucial role in enhancing farm profitability.

Since 2021, ETH NADEL has conducted the Swiss Panel Global Cooperation survey to assess the Swiss public's attitudes and commitments towards development cooperation. Read more about the Swiss public's concerns about global poverty, their support for development funding and how they believe this spending should be allocated.

Sustainable food systems require mechanisms that assure consumers about the sustainability of agricultural production. Building on the existing literature on the impact of sustainability standards, this study is the first to assess the effectiveness of participatory guarantee systems (PGS) for the certification of organic produce. The study uses representative farm-level data on local vegetable value chains in northern Vietnam and uses a broad set of sustainability outcomes as well as counterfactual analysis, including systematic robustness checks. The results show that PGS significantly improves farm profitability (+117%), agroecology performance (+40%), and gives farmers more choice of sales channels (+23%). However, PGS had no significant effect on returns to labour and reduced the average crop yield.

This paper aims to support diferentiation between sustainable and unsustainable agricultural production, with a view to

enabling a transformative agricultural trade system by incentivizing sustainable agricultural production. We argue that

transformative governance of corresponding global trade fows will need to provide support to the weaker participants

in production systems, above all small-scale farmers in the global South, in order to support their food security and a path

out of poverty as well as global environmental goals. The present article seeks to provide an overview of internationally

agreed norms that can serve as basis for diferentiation between sustainable and unsustainable agricultural systems. Such

common objectives and benchmarks could then be used in multilateral and binational trade agreements.