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The source publication explains the pros and cons of GIs, how they work, and the success factors that influence them. We have distilled the lessons from the published literature, including nearly 200 research papers, and the evidence from eight original case studies conducted in Antigua Guatemala, Nariño Colombia, Darjeeling India, Blue Mountain Jamaica, Kona Hawaii, Mezcal regions of Mexico, Veracruz Mexico, and Mongolia.The book offers a global overview of GIs today and their distribution worldwide by country and by product. It covers not only the economic or competitive value of GIs but also their considerable developmental characteristics. These include: effect on small producers, employment, and rural enterprise, culture and environment. However, it goes beyond the opportunities to suggest areas of cautions and to clearly illustrate how GIs can be problematic and are certainly not appropriate in certain cases.Best practices and lessons learned are documented in a concise and accessible manner so that anyone interested in GIs can better understand how to structure them, step-by-step, and how to consider the options available to develop them. The book covers the philosophical and political distinctions of different legal protection options and reviews the 2 differences between EU approaches and those followed in the US and in other major countries such as China and India. This includes insights on the application processes and a set of "Frequently Asked Questions" on GIs in general. The focus is predominantly on the challenges faced by developing countries.

Fair Trade is a labeling initiative aimed at improving the lives of the poor in developing countries by offering better terms to producers and helping them to organize. Although Fair Trade–certified products still comprise a small share of the market—for example, Fair Trade–certified coffee exports were 1.8 percent of global coffee exports in 2009— growth has been very rapid over the past decade. Whether Fair Trade can achieve its intended goals has been hotly debated in academic and policy circles. In particular, debates have been waged about whether Fair Trade makes “economic sense” and is sustainable in the long run. The aim of this article is to provide a critical overview of the economic theory behind Fair Trade, describing the potential benefits and potential pitfalls. We also provide an assessment of the empirical evidence of the impacts of Fair Trade to date. Because coffee is the largest single product in the Fair Trade market, our discussion here focuses on the specifics of this industry, although we will also point out some important differences with other commodities as they arise.

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Sustainability standards and certification serve to differentiate and provide market recognition to goods produced in accordance with social and environmental good practices, typically including practices to protect biodiversity. Such standards have seen rapid growth, including in tropical agricultural commodities such as cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soybeans, and tea. Given the role of sustainability standards in influencing land use in hotspots of biodiversity, deforestation, and agricultural intensification, much could be gained from efforts to evaluate and increase the conservation payoff of these schemes. To this end, we devised a systematic approach for monitoring and evaluating the conservation impacts of agricultural sustainability standards and for using the resulting evidence to improve the effectiveness of such standards over time. The approach is oriented around a set of hypotheses and corresponding research questions about how sustainability standards are predicted to deliver conservation benefits. These questions are addressed through data from multiple sources, including basic common information from certification audits; field monitoring of environmental outcomes at a sample of certified sites; and rigorous impact assessment research based on experimental or quasi-experimental methods. Integration of these sources can generate time-series data that are comparable across sites and regions and provide detailed portraits of the effects of sustainability standards. To implement this approach, we propose new collaborations between the conservation research community and the sustainability standards community to develop common indicators and monitoring protocols, foster data sharing and synthesis, and link research and practice more effectively. As the role of sustainability standards in tropical land-use governance continues to evolve, robust evidence on the factors contributing to effectiveness can help to ensure that such standards are designed and implemented to maximize benefits for biodiversity conservation.