Research Projects

Overview of ongoing projects

(An overview of our overarching research areas and vision can be found here)

FLOWERS: Facilitating local organic waste exchange for regenerative systems

Summary: Urbanization and restaurant growth in sub-Saharan Africa generate large volumes of food waste, contributing to climate emissions, safety risks, and overflowing landfills. At the same time, rural farming systems face chronic soil nutrient depletion and declining productivity. The FLOWERS project addresses this disconnect by showing how food waste flows that link restaurants and farmers can be strengthened and kick-started, improving soil fertility, livestock feed availability, and environmental outcomes. Focusing on Uganda and Malawi, FLOWERS brings researchers and practitioners together to map waste flows, identify barriers, design interventions to bring urban food waste to farmers’ fields and animals, and pilot scalable treatment options such as composting, black soldier fly farming, and anaerobic digestion — directly supporting circularity and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Focus countries: Uganda and Malawi
Contact: Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken, Dr. Olayinka Aremu, Francesca Gioia
Partners: Global Health Engineering Group (ETH Zurich), Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag); Makerere University; End Plastic Pollution, and Waste Advisers Malawi.
Duration 6/2026 - 5/2028
Funding: Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), an initiative convened by the United Nations’ Environmental Programme (UNEP) via the CCAC Food and Nutrition Challenge Programme 2025
Flowers on external page Linkedin

Sustainability standards and the hidden middle: Insights from cocoa cooperatives and their workers in Côte d’Ivoire

Summary: Sustainability standards such as Fairtrade aim to improve social and environmental conditions in global supply chains, particularly for tropical commodities like
cocoa. While existing research has largely focused on farmers and consumers, cooperatives and their employees—despite their central role in the cocoa sector and in certification systems—remain under-researched. This project addresses this gap by showing how sustainability standards affect cocoa cooperatives and the working conditions of their employees, and what the shift from private standards (such as Fairtrade) to public standards (e.g., EUDR) means for farmers’ and their cooperatives’ agency and digital inclusion. Empirically, the study is based on surveys of 200 cocoa cooperatives and 1,000 workers in Côte d’Ivoire—theworld’s largest cocoa producer.

Focus country: Côte d’Ivoire
Contacts: Juan Restrepo and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: Landscape Alliance, Joint Research Center of the European Union (JRC), Wageningen University
Duration: 9/2025 - 8/2029
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), project funding

AgriFoodTech startups for agrifood systems transformation in Africa

Summary: Agrifoodtech startups are increasingly viewed as key actors in transforming African food systems by improving efficiency, resilience, and sustainability, while also contributing to innovation, employment, and food security. Much of their anticipated impact depends on their ability to scale and sustain solutions that effectively serve smallholder farmers. However, despite growing interest, existing research focuses primarily on farmer-level outcomes and offers limited insight into the factors that enable agrifoodtech startups themselves to succeed and drive lasting change. As a result, the commercial, financial, and systemic challenges and opportunities facing these firms remain poorly understood, and the role of non-dilutive capital as a dominant source of funding has received little scholarly attention. This project addresses these gaps by generating evidence on the determinants of agrifoodtech startup success and the implications of public and non-dilutive financing for strategic behavior and performance. It does so by combining secondary data analysis, semi-structured interviews, and a large-scale survey of agrifoodtech startups across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Contacts: Wycliffe Otieno, Hauke Dahl, and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center forTropical Agriculture (CIAT)
Duration: 1/2024 - 10/2028
Funding: ETH for Development (ETH4D), doctoral fellowship

WE SEED: Scientists and farmers for better seeds

Summary: Crop breeding programs are essential for developing nutritious, climate-resilient crops and sustainable food systems. Participatory breeding integrates local knowledge to address farmers’ preferences and increase adoption. However, little is known about how these methods shape farmer–scientist interactions, whose knowledge is represented, and how this influences breeding outcomes, particularly for marginalized groups such as women farmers. The WE SEED project addresses this gap by showing how participatory methods shape knowledge sharing and inclusion in crop breeding. Combining ethnographic, econometric, and machine-learning approaches, the project engages women and men farmers and scientists working on pigeon pea and cowpea. It produces practical tools, including a farmer-led crop ontology, ethnographic analyses, and role-playing workshops, to inform policy andpractice in public breeding programs.

Focus country: Malawi
Contacts: Dr. Occelli Martina and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) and Malawi’s Department of Agricultural Research (DARS)
Duration: 10/2025 - 4/2027
Funding: ETH for Development (ETH4D), research challenges grant

Agro-Econfirm: A farm-to-fork approach to sustainable vegetable production and healthy diets

Summary: Ensuring the production of safe vegetables is essential for public health and sustainable food systems, yet it remains highly labor-intensive for smallholder farmers. In rural Vietnam, limited access to affordable labor and weak incentives for safe production encourage the use of harmful agrochemicals, while farmers struggle to credibly communicate food safety to price-constrained consumers. Despite the potential of voluntary sustainability standards and participatory guarantee systems (PGS) to support knowledge sharing and market trust, participation has stagnated or declined, indicating a gap between available approaches and locally viable solutions. This project addresses this gap by identifying how labor-saving production techniques and consumer-facing communication strategies can be adapted to local conditions to revitalize PGS participation. It does so by generating evidence on farmer constraints, testing context-appropriate technical and marketing innovations, and analyzing value-chain dynamics, with the dual aim of strengthening local vegetable value chains and providing policymakers with an evidence base to support the scaling of safe vegetable initiatives in Vietnam.

Focus Country: Vietnam
Contacts: Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken, Dr. Patrick Illien
Partners: Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) and Vietnam National University of Agriculture (VNUA)
Duration: 10/2025 - 9/2029
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Vietnamese-Swiss joint research program

Decent work and labor supply in Swiss horticulture

Summary: Horticultural production relies heavily on human labor, yet precarious working conditions contribute to low domestic labor supply and growing labor shortages. Demographic change further intensifies these challenges, raising urgent questions about how to ensure a reliable workforce and decent working conditions in domestic fruit and vegetable production. This is particularly relevant for Switzerland, given its high dependence on imported horticultural products. This project generates evidence on labor management strategies in Swiss horticulture and pay and working conditions among female and male workers and farmers, identifying ways to secure a sustainable labor supply. It combines qualitative stakeholder interviews, grounded theory, respondent-driven sampling, and secondary data analysis.

Focus country: Switzerland
Contacts: Celestina Heepen and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: Agricultural Economics and Policy Group (ETH Zurich) and UC Louvain
Duration: 2/2024 - 1/2027
Funding: ETH collaboration grant

Agricultural labor markets and policy in Europe

Summary: Minimum wage policies are a central labor-market institution worldwide, designed to protect low-skilled workers from low pay and precarious employment. Existing research demonstrates that minimum wages are generally effective in raising earnings for low-skilled agricultural workers. However, much less is known about how these policies affect farmers. In agriculture, where labor is a major production cost, concerns persist that higher labor standards may threaten farm viability and shift production to countries with lower standards. This project generates empirical evidence on how changes in labor standards affect farm production decisions and agricultural trade across the European Union. Using harmonized data and quantitative econometric methods, the project informspolicies that balance worker protection with a competitive agricultural sector.

Focus region: Europe, Germany
Contacts: Marie Kammer and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: Purdue University
Duration: 2/2023 - 1/2027
Funding: Fulbright Schuman grant for research stay at Purdue (grantee: Marie Kammer)

Past Projects

Agricultural wage employment in Nigeria’s growing tomato sector

Summary: Agricultural labor markets in sub-Saharan Africa underpin rural employment, food production, and poverty reduction. Yet, they are often assumed to be characterized by poor working conditions, labor shortages, rigid wages, limited worker mobility, and weak access to information. Rigorous evidence on these challenges and the effects of emerging trends, such as commercial farming and labor contractors, remains scarce. This project generates policy-relevant evidence on agricultural labor markets in Nigeria’s growing tomato sector, where local and migrant workers are recruited directly by farmers or through labor contractors. Combining matched farmer–worker surveys, contractor interviews, and survey experiments, it identifies key labor market constraints and pathways to improve job quality andlabor market performance.

Focus country: Nigeria
Contacts: Olayinka Aremu, Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: University of Ibadan and KU Leuven
Duration: 3/2022 - 3/2026

Agricultural labor markets amidst conflict in Myanmar

Summary: Violent conflict has reached its highest global level since World War II, affecting around two billion people and disrupting livelihoods worldwide. Its impacts fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations, including food-insecure communities and landless rural workers who depend on agricultural labor markets. While research has explored conflict’s effects on agricultural production, less is known about its consequences for farm wages, working conditions, mental health, and labor productivity. This project addresses these gaps by studying how violent conflict affects agricultural labor markets and farm workers’ well-being in Myanmar, one of today’s most severe conflict settings. We combine unique, large-scale nationwide surveys of farm workers with conflict data and survey experiments to assess conflict impacts and data quality in conflict-affected contexts.

Focus country: Myanmar
Contacts: Andew Laitha and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Duration: 5/2022 - 4/2026
Funding: Leading House Asia Early-Career Grant 2024 for research stay at IFPRI in Laos P.D.R (Grantee: Andrew Laitha)

Empowering informal workers through unionization

Summary: Informal labor dominates employment across Sub-Saharan Africa, with food systems employing large numbers of informal workers. Informal food services employ many women under precarious conditions, making the sector central to debates on gender, job quality, and social protection. However, research has largely focused on self-employed operators, overlooking hired workers who face distinct vulnerabilities. Evidence is also limited on how working conditions can be improved and whether unions can support workers in the informal economy. This project addresses these gaps by studying informal food service workers in Accra, Ghana, with a focus on their experiences and views on working conditions and union involvement. In collaboration with a key Ghanaian workers’ union, we use participatory photovoice methods to explore working conditions, collective action, and pathways to better jobs and social protection, with lessons extending beyond Ghana.

Focus country: Ghana
Contacts: Dr. Patrick Illien, Dr. Anna Fabry, and Prof. Eva-Marie Meemken
Partners: University of Ghana and Informal Economy Workers’ Forum (INFORUM)
Duration: 12/2023 - 1/2025
Funding: ETH for Development (ETH4D), pilot grant