Sustainability Has a Price Tag. Nobody Wants to Pick It Up.

By Curtis Akunfu

Everyone, it seems, wants sustainable agriculture. Consumers want it. Retailers want it. Governments want it. Development finance institutions want it. Regulators are increasingly mandating it. And African producers and exporters are expected to deliver it – on schedule, at scale, and without complaint.

What almost nobody wants to discuss is who foots the bill.

As exporters brace for rules such as the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), sustainability has stopped being a matter of good intentions and become a matter of infrastructure. Farms must be mapped. Farmers must be identified and registered. Supply chains must be traced from field to port. Land-use risk must be assessed. Records must be digitized. Field officers must be hired, trained, and deployed. Data must be verified, audited, and defensible. None of that is free, and someone, ultimately, has to pay for it.

The Compliance Bill Is Already Landing

Some Nigerian cocoa exporters report spending roughly US$30 to US$80 per metric ton just to build the systems needed for EUDR compliance. One exporter says it has mapped 124,000 hectares of farmland and assembled a 35-person sustainability team to keep the data current and credible.

That is a serious commitment of capital and labor. Yet exporters say some European buyers are resisting efforts to pass even a fraction of those costs down the supply chain. They want the traceability, the assurances, and the paperwork – but they want to keep paying commodity prices for what has effectively become a premium product.

That is where the conversation turns uncomfortable. You cannot demand premium-grade standards while insisting on commodity-grade pricing. Something has to give, and right now it is the farmer and the exporter absorbing the difference.

This Is Bigger Than Cocoa

The pattern extends well beyond cocoa: cashew, shea, soy, coffee, sesame – the list of commodities now facing origin and sustainability scrutiny keeps growing. Global buyers increasingly want to know where a product came from, who grew it, whether it caused deforestation, whether labor practices meet acceptable standards, and whether the whole chain can be traced from farm to final destination.

These are reasonable questions to ask. In fact, I believe this shift is ultimately good for African agriculture – it rewards transparency, formalizes informal supply chains, and could open access to more discerning, higher-value markets.

But sustainability is not free, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make the invoice disappear.

A smallholder farmer cannot finance an international compliance architecture out of an already razor-thin farm-gate margin. An exporter cannot indefinitely absorb the cost of mapping, traceability, certification, and monitoring while still competing on price against unregulated, untraced commodities. And buyers cannot keep demanding increasingly sophisticated, audit-ready supply chains while treating the cost of building them as somebody else’s problem.

Shared Value Should Mean Shared Cost

If sustainability generates value across the supply chain – and it does, in the form of market access, brand trust, and regulatory cover – then logic suggests its cost should be shared across that same chain, not dumped entirely on the weakest link.

That raises the questions this industry actually needs to answer:

• Who invests in building the traceability infrastructure?
• Who owns the data that infrastructure generates?
• Who captures the commercial upside when that data unlocks premium markets?
• Who carries the cost when the market raises the bar yet again?

Right now, the answers to those four questions are badly out of balance. The people investing the most – farmers and exporters – are rarely the ones capturing the greatest reward or holding the greatest leverage.

The Risk of Two African Agricultural Economies

If compliance keeps getting more expensive without a corresponding shift in how costs are shared, the industry risks splitting, perhaps unintentionally, into two parallel systems: the visible farmer, mapped, verified, and able to access premium global markets, and the invisible farmer, left outside the system entirely, unable to afford entry into it.

That would be a poor outcome for an industry that markets itself on inclusion and rural livelihoods. A sustainability regime that only the well-capitalized can afford to join is not really sustainable at all; it’s exclusionary, dressed up in the language of standards.

Standards Alone Won’t Save This

The next chapter of sustainable agriculture cannot be only about raising the bar. It has to be equally about building commercial models capable of sustaining that bar over time, financing mechanisms, shared-cost arrangements, and pricing structures that treat compliance as a real input cost rather than a rounding error someone downstream is expected to absorb.

Everyone wants sustainability. Fewer are willing to pay for it. That gap, more than any single regulation, will determine whether African agriculture’s sustainability push succeeds or quietly leaves millions of farmers behind.

The real test was never whether the industry could raise its standards. It’s whether the industry is willing to pay for them.

Curtis Akunfu is the Managing Director of Duapa Agri, a vertically integrated agribusiness operating across West and East Africa. With nearly 20 years of leadership in Africa’s agri-commodities sector, he also serves as a Global Council Member and Chair of the Agricultural Finance and Investment Working Group at the World Agriculture Forum.