Summary
UTZ commissioned this independent evaluation of its coffee program in Central America to the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) before the merger of UTZ and Rainforest Alliance. Hence, the questions and findings reflect the concerns and realities of the pre-merger UTZ coffee program in that region. Both programs have been integrated from 2018 onwards. We believe that given the similarities and overlap between both pre-merger certification programs, the findings of this evaluation study are to a large extent valid and relevant for the merged program as well. Having commissioned several independent evaluations over the past years to measure and understand the effects of certification for individual producers (farmers), UTZ decided to focus this evaluation on the added value of the UTZ coffee certification program at the level of the certificate holders. The choices and limitations faced by certificate holders when deciding on adopting (or not) a given certification program are an important factor in bringing about sustainability improvements with individual producers and workers. We noticed that multi-certification, notably with Fairtrade, organic, Rainforest Alliance and company programs such as C.A.F.E Practices is very common in Central America. From a methodological perspective, multi-certification makes it very challenging to disentangle and attribute effects of different certification schemes. Instead, we chose to focus on the added value of UTZ certification to the business and (sustainability) practices of certificates holders. This ensuing report is based on an in-depth qualitative study comparing a sample of three main types of certificate holders: individual estates, producer-led groups and trader-led groups, in three producing countries: Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala.