Coffee enthusiasts and traders are buzzing about one of the world’s finest brews: a specialty coffee made from 100% Arabica beans, cultivated and hand-picked by small farmers, often promoted as “made by women.” This exceptional coffee hails from Rwanda. But what lies beneath this appealing narrative? A research team from CDE delved into this question in Nyamasheke, the heart of Rwandan coffee cultivation. They explored how agricultural structural changes have affected the local community, especially women. Read the full CDE storymap.

New CDE project that aims to identify enabling mechanisms that Swiss policymakers could use to develop and implement a smallholder-friendlier version of the EUDR, a new EU regulation on deforestation-free supply chains.

Reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) projects and programmes promise to deliver performance-based, cost-effective climate change mitigation. Fifteen years after its conception, we analysed the rigorous counterfactual-based evidence for environmental and welfare effects from such national and subnational initiatives, along with a Theory of Change.

This chapter examines processes of land grabbing in Laos, where the government has granted 4 percent of the national territory to foreign and domestic plantation, mining, and hydropower investors. A major portion of this land has been developed through the coercive dispossession of peasant land. However, the development of land concessions has not been a frictionless process as peasants have become increasingly frustrated with the expropriation of their land and have found various ways to voice their concerns within the country’s constrained political environment While the Lao government has made significant reforms to land-related policies in recent years, we show how these changes are driven by dynamic social and political relationships amongst state agencies, foreign investors, and peasant communities.