How can we give cocoa farmers a sweeter deal?
With demand for chocolate apparently projected to go through the roof as new territories like India and China start to clamour for the world’s favourite sweet treat, you would think it would be cause for cocoa farmers to celebrate.
But the reason demand is due to outstrip supply is not just about new markets coming on stream, it is largely due to decades of lack of investment in cocoa farming particularly in West Africa where the bulk of cocoa comes from. So today across West Africa farmers are getting old, and so are their trees, and the next generation sees little reason to stay on the family farm. The huge players who dominate the chocolate market — including Kraft and Nestle and Mars who you will have heard of, and Barry Callebaut and Cargill who you may not know — have been shaken by these forecasts into investing £millions in order to secure their supply chains. What none of them are offering is to pay cocoa farmers more.
Typically a cocoa farmer in Ghana, the second biggest cocoa producer after Cote D’Ivoire, will earn around 2000 cedis or £360 per year. (Cocoa farmers in Ghana are smallholders, with farms ranging from 2–20 acres, whose earnings depend on the size and productivity of the farm and how well it does during the two cocoa seasons.) Typically, though often burdened with both farming and the full care of extended families, women secure even less income than men. This income needs to be enough to feed, house and educate their families, as well as buying everything they need to keep their farms productive. It is no wonder that when you ask the young people in these communities what they want to do you’re likely to be told “hairdresser”, “doctor”, “seamstress”, “bank assistant” — anything but staying on the farm and living hand to mouth.
The gulf between this world and the world where an average 100g bar of chocolate is bought for around £1.80 — and here in UK we are eating an average of 11kg of chocolate a year — couldn’t be more extreme. In 2012 it was estimated that the value of the world chocolate market was worth around ten times the value of the world cocoa market — by 2019 this ratio is projected to go up by a factor of six (source: Market and Markets) — which tells you a lot about what some milk, sugar and great brand marketing can do. Fundamental to business is the continuous drive to deliver the highest possible profits, which inevitably leads to driving input prices as low as possible. In the chocolate supply chain it has been expedient to keep cocoa farmers paid as little as possible and in the dark about chocolate, and the money their product is making at the other end of the supply chain. When I first went to Ghana back in 1999, many of the farmers I spoke to had never tasted chocolate, and had no idea that was what their cocoa was making, let alone what people in other countries spent on it. Divine Chocolate, with its 44% farmer ownership model, and shareholders who are genuinely committed to Divine’s mission to improve lives for cocoa farmers, is turning that accepted model on its head. The members of Kuapa Kokoo farmers’ co-operative are choosing for themselves how to invest their additional income in their families, farms and communities, and in improving access to water, healthcare and education. Women farmers are being trained and mentored to enable them to improve their income and opportunities in their communities. Farmers are sharing the wealth they are helping to create, and have unprecedented access to the cocoa and chocolate markets.
It is true that the world’s biggest chocolate companies are spending £millions to secure a future for cocoa and chocolate. Farmers are being trained, and new disease resistant seedlings being distributed in order to increase productivity. There is also some investment in improving communities to help keep farmers on their farms. But we need a future for cocoa farming which is sustainable — not just for chocolate companies and chocolate lovers — but for the people growing the crop. The holy grail of increased productivity does not necessarily lead to increased income as it demands greater spend on inputs and labour, and focusing on a single cash crop that has no direct nutritional value for the family does not necessarily result in better all-round wellbeing.
We need to accept that the future sustainability of all our food supplies, 80% of which we depend on smallholder farmers to provide (UNEP 2013), needs to factor in sustaining people, their land, and communities — not just higher productivity and efficiency at whatever cost. Paying farmers sustainably means paying enough for them not only to support their families but to invest in the future of their farms. Farmers can be the best stewards of the land — in the case of cocoa farmers they maintain the tropical rainforest beneath which their cocoa grows best, and they intercrop with other local foods to help keep the land fertile… well they do unless someone makes it worth their while to sell land to a logger or gold miner — much more likely if you earn very little. Giving them the means to care for their land, and make a viable business from their farming, means we are thinking long term — not just about making sure we have chocolate for decades to come, but keeping the both the land fertile, and the rural communities that live on it thriving for generations to come.
If we want to go on eating chocolate, we need farmers to see a future in growing cocoa. Divine Chocolate’s business model — which gives cocoa farmers the biggest share of the company — serves to demonstrate what is possible if sustainable trade with cocoa farmers is your goal. Divine has proved it can work, at scale (Kuapa Kokoo co-op which owns the biggest share of Divine has 85,000+ members, and produces around 6% of Ghana’s cocoa — and Divine is sold in supermarkets and independent shops around the world) and traceable from bean to bar. Our mission has at its heart objectives that are closely aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. If we can do it — creating a real global partnership with farmers, empowering women, and giving farmers the incentive to create and maintain thriving rural communities, then so can global businesses. Around the world business has a responsibility to step up to the plate and together aim to meet the Sustainable Development Goals — we’re showing what’s possible if we all really want it enough.
Sophi Tranchell, CEO, Divine Chocolate
