The prevalence of food quality standards in international trade is constantly increasing and has a growing influence on developing countries. A wide range of literature in development economics has focused on the debate of whether international standards exclude small-scale farmers from high-value food markets. In fact, the evidence is mixed. New debates arise on what conditions small farmers can really comply with, pointing out both threshold capital requirements, on the one hand, and industry structure and institutional environment, on the other hand. Drawing on a microeconomic approach, our paper is a contribution to the literature exploring the patterns and determinants of smallholders’ adoption of the food standard. We focus our case study on... |