COSA Teams with UN International Trade Centre
COSA has reached an agreement with the United Nations International Trade Centre (ITC) to facilitate the development of a highly functional platform that will offer stakeholders worldwide access to COSA data gathered in countries around the world.
The ITC already provides some of the best trade and development data. This strategic collaboration fits the ITC's mandate to provide a better understanding of the impacts of sustainable trade approaches, and enables COSA to broaden its scope to include additional crops and countries. ITC's global capacity and reputation will help ensure the security and confidentiality of the data and will enable global web-based access, even to the poorest regions of the world.
What are the income differences when applying sustainability standards? Does the gender of a farmer affect the outcome? Are there measurable environmental changes when compared with conventional farmers? For the first time, farmers and policy researchers will be able to conduct their own analyses of the various costs and benefits experienced by producers that use sustainability standards. The ITC's COSA data will help answer these and many other questions when it is ready later in 2009.
