Chinwe Ifejika Speranza, professor at the University of Bern’s Institute of Geography, talks about an ERC research project that tries to highlight how small forest patches in West Africa’s highly fragmented agricultural landscapes support biodiversity and climate protection.

Consuming countries increasingly seek to ensure that value chains are deforestation-free. Learn more about the CDE project, which promotes deforestation-free requirements and traceability systems that prioritize the ecological, sociocultural, and economic well-being of producing countries. Solutions are being tested in designated pilot sites in Ethiopia, with a focus on the coffee sector.

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.