Enabling Environment
The interrelated sustainability challenges of human rights, environmental protection and living income all find roots and key approaches to solutions in the enabling environment. This includes key issues such as regulation, rural development, transparency & accountability, and the decolonisation of the conversation.
Regulation
Mandatory sustainability regulations are rapidly becoming the new standard for global commodities, including cocoa. This shift is both necessary and overdue, as it establishes a level playing field that prioritizes human rights and environmental preservation. Embracing this new norm, where sustainability is a requisite rather than a choice, is vital for the industry’s future.
Despite concerns about implementation, and with increasing concern about the reliability of the EU as a regulator, these regulations offer significant benefits for the planet, farmers, and the cocoa sector. They aim to curtail deforestation, enhance human rights protections, and boost the credibility of sustainability claims. By mandating that cocoa and chocolate companies address the living income needs of smallholders, these regulations make it clear that farmer poverty is unacceptable. Additionally, the private sector stands to gain from a more harmonized and equitable marketplace, where all players must adhere to the same sustainability standards.
Rural development
Although the cocoa sector is a major economic force in most cocoa-producing nations, governments tend to view the sector as a never-ending natural resource and requires only minimal management. Governments need to recognize that their cocoa sectors require both management and protection and need to adopt a long-term vision for rural and agricultural development. Achieving the vision will require reliable, credible, and long-term governance. These must be holistic rural development strategies, coupled with inclusively developed landscape roadmaps.
Transparency and accountability
The effective and credible implementation and maintenance of rural development strategies and infrastructure investments requires a transparent and accountable government. Governments need to ensure that credible national traceability systems are functioning and act as convenors for independent accountability and governance frameworks. Producing governments could also play a key role in providing key sector data and market information. Governments should commit to improved financial transparency, on both income and expenditure from cocoa. Lastly, producing governments should ensure that civil society and farmer organisations are actively involved in dialogue and policy making for the cocoa sector.
Addressing decolonisation
The current reality of the global cocoa trade – and the injustices and inequality that it contains – cannot be understood without the context of the past; the history of colonization informs trade structures that have transitioned into our era. Interventions are generally chosen that are convenient to those in power, not to those who must implement the interventions. Whether or not the lack of representation is intended, the lived reality for those that are not represented is equally harsh. If decisions are made by those in Europe and the United States, those decisions tend to favour those in power.
The role of VOICE
The VOICE network has been actively advocating for regulatory approaches for many years, and was one of the founding members of the Cocoa Coalition, a group of chocolate and cocoa companies actively advocating for ambitious sustainability regulation. With our many publications and advocacy work, we are also one of the key voices pushing the sector towards more transparency & accountability. Lastly, our own journey of decolonisation is far from over, but we remain committed to this process; in our governance structure, in our staffing, in our advocacy, and in our chosen topics.
