Ethical certification schemes, labels such as Fair Trade that guarantee consumers a product was grown under specified labor and environmental standards, are typically defended on the premise that the price premium consumers pay for a certified good flows back to the producers who bear the cost of meeting those standards, giving smallholder farmers a strong incentive to seek and retain certification. Field research on coffee and cacao supply chains complicates this account. Tracing the premium from retail shelf to farm gate, several studies find that intermediaries, exporters, processors, and retailers, capture most of the markup consumers pay, while the share reaching the farmer barely covers, and in some seasons fails to cover, the added cost of compliance: extra labor for organic pest control, recordkeeping for audits, and fees paid to certifying bodies. On this reading, certification functions less as a mechanism for redistributing value to producers than as a marketing device whose principal beneficiaries sit further up the chain. This finding does not, however, settle whether certification benefits farmers on net. Certified cooperatives frequently gain access to multi-year purchase contracts and preferential credit terms unavailable to uncertified growers, benefits that do not appear in a comparison of price premiums alone and that several of the same studies find largely offset the shortfall in direct payment. Whether certification is worth its cost to a given farmer, in other words, turns on benefits the price-premium critique does not measure.