Environmental and Social Standards, Certification and Labelling for Cash Crops. Cora Dankers, Pascal Liu. FAO Commodities and Trade Technical Paper No. 2.
A variety of voluntary social and environmental standards and certification programmes in agriculture have appeared during the past twenty years.
Governments have been or become involved in some of them, most obviously in organic agriculture and the related labelling. Other programmes are driven by the agriculture sector itself, such as, again, organic agriculture, or the programmes involved in the COLEACP Harmonized Framework or by the food retail sector, such as EurepGap. However, most social and environmental standards have been developed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as the fair-trade system, the Social Accountability standard SA8000 and the SAN/Rainforest Alliance 'sustainable agriculture programme'.
