Résumé
Social and environmental issues including climatic changes, plant diseases and vulnerability of producers and smallholders, threaten worldwide coffee production and in particular Arabica coffee. Meanwhile, social and environmental requirements are increasingly at the heart of the consumers' demand. All actors of the value-chain have a clear interest in engaging in agro-ecological and social initiatives preserving ecosystems and offering decent remuneration to farmers through a sustainable production of a high quality coffee. Coffee/Cocoa agroforestry Business driven Clusters (CaFC) are part of such initiatives as a new organizational model to finance social and environmental innovations. Defined as local micro value-chains dedicated to sustainable production under agroforestry of high quality Arabica coffee, CaFC are based on an original organization orchestrated by a network of five types of stakeholders forming an Innovation platform: producers, roasters, brokers, investors and CIRAD for methodology and engineering. In some cases, certification agencies could be integrated to this platform. Based on a 1300 ha prototype project in Nicaragua (MATRICE) initiated in 2016 funded by the Moringa fund. We will describe the operational principles of CaFC, the respective roles of each stakeholder in such projects (Moringa, NicaFrance, CIRAD, producers, ECOM…), as well as the added-value for each of them, the consumers and the environment. In a context of both the falling real prices of coffee and the continuous contestation of certification systems to internalize social and environmental problems, we will discuss why CaFC could be a sustainable governance mechanism among stakeholders as well as an alternative traceability scheme in conventional but also in organic production of Arabica coffee or cocoa. Finally we discuss its possibility of extension to other contexts such as Vietnam or Cameroon through the Breedcafs H2020 European project.