The Cocoa Coalition believes that the European Commission’s proposed Regulation on Deforestation represents an important step forward in driving the necessary transformation of the cocoa and chocolate sector.

As a coalition of companies, certification organisations, NGOs and multi-stakeholder organisations operating in the cocoa and chocolate sector, we have consistently called for the EU to introduce mandatory obligations of due diligence extending throughout the supply chain.

We welcome many elements of the regulation, including the application of the due diligence requirements throughout the cocoa and chocolate supply chain within the EU, and the inclusion of the requirement for full geolocation information on the origin of the products covered by the regulation.

We believe it could be further strengthened through the following steps, explained in more detail in the attached position statement:

– A strengthening of the requirements on the Commission to develop partnerships with producer countries, recognising that effectiveness of the legislation will be limited unless it is coupled with the creation of the enabling environment required to address the root causes of deforestation.
– The Commission should conduct a comprehensive needs assessment of the challenges that will be faced by smallholder farmers in complying with the regulation; this should not wait for the regulation to enter into force. 
– The scope of the regulation should be extended to other natural ecosystems as well as forests.
– The threshold company size should be changed to from SMEs to micro-enterprises.
– Operators should be obliged to engage with relevant stakeholders, including smallholder farmers, as part of the due diligence procedure, and measures should be required to ensure that the ownership of the geolocation data provided as part of the information requirements remains with the farmers.
– The benchmarking analysis should be extended to include a wider range of elements in the producer country.

The Cocoa Coalition welcomes the European Commission’s proposed Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence published on 23 February; we regard it as a genuinely ground-breaking legislative proposal. As a coalition of companies, certification organisations, NGOs and multi-stakeholder organisations operating in the cocoa and chocolate sector, we have consistently called for the EU to introduce mandatory obligations of due diligence extending throughout the supply chain. (See our detailed proposals published in 2019 and 2021.) 

Requiring companies to work together with their suppliers, supply-chain partners and other stakeholders throughout their supply chains to identify, address and communicate on human rights and environmental risks in their operations and supply chains is essential to achieving the transformation of the cocoa and chocolate sector. In line with the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, which have largely inspired the proposed legislation, we believe that all companies in the cocoa and chocolate sector, regardless of their size, must implement such due diligence obligations; they are well-placed to generate and protect social and environmental benefits through their due diligence efforts.
We recognise that smaller companies may possess simpler supply chains. We do not believe, however, that these companies should be exempted from the due diligence obligation. In a very fragmented end market, the inclusion of smaller players is critical to establish a level playing field and to ensure that all companies do their part and work closer together to improve the sustainability of the cocoa sector.

For the legislation to be fully effective it needs to be coupled with the strengthening of the enabling environment for sustainable cocoa farming, and we therefore also call on the European Commission to make greater efforts to engage in stakeholder dialogue – notably, in the cocoa-sector context, with smallholder farmers and their communities – and to pursue the establishment of bilateral partnership agreements between the EU and cocoa-producing countries. One major objective of this combination of elements – this corporate sustainability due diligence directive, the proposed regulation on deforestation and action on the ground in producer countries – should be to aim to deliver living incomes for cocoa farmers, an essential step in achieving a sustainable cocoa sector.

We look forward to engaging with Members of the European Parliament and representatives of member-state governments in further improving and implementing the proposed directive.

[Note: the Cocoa Coalition comprises companies (Ferrero, Hershey, Mars Wrigley, Mondelēz International, Nestle, Tony’s Chocolonely), certification organisations (Fairtrade International, Rainforest Alliance), NGOs (Fair Trade Advocacy Office, Fern, Solidaridad, VOICE Network) and multi-stakeholder organisations (International Cocoa Initiative).]

The VOICE Network – at the request of key civil society organisations (CSOs) throughout Europe – are setting up a CSO alignment platform across the various national multi-stakeholder Initiatives for Sustainable Cocoa (ISCOs).

We are looking for a Coordinator to function as a flexible and lightweight secretariat that supports content-based engagement at national and cross-national level by individual CSOs.

More information in the document attached. Please respond by December 31st 2021.

ISCO CSO Alignment Platform for ISCOs – Coordinator Job Description

A group of companies, NGOs, certification organisations and multistakeholder organisations has furthered its calls to the EU, demanding ambitious human rights and environmental due diligence legislation.

The legislation should apply to all companies, without exclusions, should allow for a broad mix of means of enforcement including the option for civil liability, and should cover a wide range of rights including the right to a living income.

The call for regulation can be found here, and a full press release can be read here.

To mark Juneteenth 2021, NGOs across the Global North and South published this open letter, calling on all of us to stamp out any residual elements of racism within the chocolate industry and throughout our food production systems. As a result of co-signing this letter, we have now started an internal process reviewing our own internal processes around racial justice, and how we can better be anti-racist in our advocacy towards the cocoa sector.

We, a group of companies (Ferrero, Mars Wrigley, Mondelēz International, Nestle, Tony’s Chocolonely, Unilever), certification organisations (Fairtrade International, Rainforest Alliance), NGOs (Fair Trade Advocacy Office, VOICE Network) and multi-stakeholder organisations (International Cocoa Initiative), call on the European Commission to pursue the establishment of bilateral agreements between the European Union and cocoa-producing countries to contribute to establishing a fully sustainable cocoa supply chain, complementing other policy frameworks such as the upcoming Sustainable Corporate Governance Directive and Deforestation Regulation.

We believe that a combination of policy measures is needed for cocoa-farming households to earn a living income, to reduce and eventually eliminate human rights abuses, including child labour, and to put an end to environmental degradation. While the two new legislative proposals will create an obligation for companies to address these issues in their value chains, these efforts must be supported by the right enabling environment, addressing the root causes of the prevalent human rights and environmental issues in the cocoa sector.

To this end, we believe that it is essential for the EU to pursue the establishment of long-term partnership agreements with the governments of cocoa-producing countries, ensuring that all relevant stakeholders are involved, including local community representatives, farmers, industry, and civil society. These partnership agreements should include time-bound frameworks for action for all parties involved.

In 2019, we called on the EU to take action in two respects: to develop mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation, and to negotiate bilateral partnership agreements with cocoa origin governments. We welcome the progress the European Commission has made to date in developing proposals for due diligence legislation, and we hope that proposals will be submitted in the course of the year, thus allowing for proper continuation of the process and harmonisation across the EU. At the same time, we stress the importance of developing partnership agreements in parallel to this regulatory framework.

We welcome the efforts made by the European Commission so far in promoting responsible business conduct and sustainable cocoa, including through establishing the EU multi-stakeholder dialogue for sustainable cocoa both at EU and at national level in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. As the first round of these dialogues are coming to an end, we call on the Commission to consider the negotiation of specific partnership agreements as a logical and necessary next step.

Our joint position paper outlining the importance and potential contents of such partnership agreements is available here, and is summarised below.

We look forward pursuing an effective dialogue with EU and national authorities as well as other stakeholders in the cocoa sector. We invite others to endorse our joint position paper.

Enquiries should be addressed to: Paolo Giro, Paolo.Giro@be.nestle.com.

Joint position paper on partnership agreements for cocoa: summary

All signatories to this position paper aim to achieve a fully sustainable cocoa sector.

A crucial element of an EU strategy to achieve this aim is the introduction of two new legislative instruments: a directive on human rights and environmental due diligence and a regulation to ensure imported products have not caused deforestation. This legislation would help to create frameworks for responsible business conduct and the sustainable and responsible consumption of cocoa and derived products within the EU, the world’s largest consumer of cocoa and chocolate.

At the same time, we believe that the effectiveness of such due diligence legislation will also depend on the creation of a supportive enabling environment in origin countries.

We believe that a critical means of delivering such a supportive environment is through the establishment of long-term partnership agreements with the governments of cocoa-producing countries, ensuring that all relevant stakeholders are involved, including local community representatives, industry and civil society.

These partnership agreements should set out clear and time-bound frameworks for action and measures that need to be taken by all concerned parties. They should place a particular emphasis on actions at the policy level by producer governments, and include technical and financial support mechanisms from the EU and its member states to ensure that the necessary actions can be implemented successfully.

Accordingly, we call for partnership agreements between the EU and the governments of cocoa-producing countries that establish clear responsibilities for each partner. Their aim should be to:

1. Clarify what is needed to establish a sustainable cocoa sector within the producer-country partner and what different actors in the supply chain need to do to achieve it (which should also feed into sector-specific guidelines for due diligence legislation).
2. Set out the policy changes, and/or improved enforcement of existing policies, that would be needed to produce cocoa sustainably.
3. Put in place incentive and support mechanisms, including funding and capacity-building, to ensure that the required policy changes and measures are implemented.
4. Establish monitoring systems to assess the impacts of the policy changes and measures and ensure that any unintended negative consequences for people or the environment are avoided.for people or the environment are avoided.

On the International Day for the Elimination of Child Labour, dozens of civil society organisations from across the world – in both consuming and producing nations – are calling cocoa companies and governments to start living up to decades-old promises to tackle child labour in the cocoa sector.

This year should have been a landmark in the fight against child labour in cocoa. Instead, the cocoa sector as a whole has been conspicuously quiet on this topic.

It is time that the cocoa sector lived up to its promises and started to deliver on a sector wide and ambitious plan to tackle child labour and poverty. The industry’s collective silence this year is shameful and inappropriate.

Read the full statement here (in English and in French).

In the past weeks, the governments of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire have accused three companies – Hershey, Olam and Mars – of trying to avoid the payment of the LID (a premium on top of the world market price for cocoa, aimed to increase the income of cocoa farmers, announced a year ago). Though details are unclear, there are three principles in this discussion that the VOICE Network would like to underline.

First, in order to achieve a Living Income – which is a human right – the payment of higher prices to farmers is going to be essential. The prices that farmers receive for their cocoa should be going up, not down, and the LID has been a crucial first step. Any company that claims to pursue sustainable cocoa should be demonstrably involved in processes to raise the farm gate price, with the goal to achieve a living income. Any company attempting to lower prices is not pursuing sustainability.

That farm gate prices (i.e. the price farmers get) need to go up has been true for the last two decades, but is even more important now because of the impacts of COVID-19 on the cocoa market, with farmers losing income and seeing costs of living rise.

Second, the discussion shows the need for much more transparency and accountability for the cocoa sector, especially around supply chains and prices. It raises serious questions about the untraceable nature of cocoa bought and sold at the terminal markets, and brings new urgency to the need to make such markets fully traceable. Worldwide, it should always be clear where cocoa is sourced from, whether fair prices are paid to farmers, and whether environmental and social concerns are being addressed in this sourcing. Without traceability, it is simply not possible to ensure cocoa is free of deforestation, child labor, or other abuses. Without transparency it is impossible to hold actors accountable for their actions.

Third, we are concerned that farmers have been made the bargaining chips in this conflict. When the Ivorian and Ghanaian governments suspended Hershey’s sustainability programmes, necessary support to farmers and farmer organisations was put at risk – including child labour intervention systems, the payments of premiums, and input support from certification systems. There must be ways to challenge multinationals without further putting pressure on the already vulnerable position of farmers. Furthermore, farmers and local civil society should be consulted in an inclusive and deliberative manner prior to the introduction of measures that significantly affect farmers. 

The bottom line must be: governments and industry should maintain farmer’s rights and wellbeing as a top priority in all considerations of cocoa prices. Companies should stop shortchanging farmers, locking them into dire poverty, and authorities should not punish companies in a way that jeopardizes farmers. At minimum the chocolate industry should pay the LID price to farmers, and in fact should be paying each and every cocoa farmer a living income price for West African cocoa of $3,166 or more.

Cocoa Barometer demands system change to end cocoa poverty

After two decades of failed interventions across the cocoa sector, cocoa farming communities are still battling the effects of poverty, child labour and deforestation. The 2020 Cocoa Barometer report published this week is a rallying call to action: it outlines the necessary steps governments and industry should take, together with farmers and civic society organisations, to end deforestation and human rights abuses in cocoa supply chains.

As a biennial review of sustainability in the cocoa sector, the 2020 Cocoa Barometer report provides stark details of how little positive impact current and past interventions are having for the farmers at the beginning of the supply chain. Twenty years into rhetoric, the challenges on the ground remain as large as ever. Poverty is still the daily reality for virtually all West African cocoa farmer families, child labour remains rife and old growth forests continue to be cleared to make way for cocoa production.

Now is an important window of opportunity to move towards justice, as momentum for change is gathering across different stakeholders. Thanks to campaigning civil society organisations, the last two years have seen an increasing number of chocolate companies asking for regulation; significant global actors like the EU are committed to putting legislation in place; and the world’s two largest producers of cocoa, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, have formed a cartel to drive up the price for cocoa farmers.

“After two decades of voluntary initiatives that do not tackle the root causes, it is time for systemic change in the sector,” says Cocoa Barometer co-author Antonie C. Fountain of the VOICE Network. “All the ingredients are there to make it work, but it is now time to move forward, and put in place ambitious, holistic and mandatory change, so that we can finally tackle the poverty, child labour and deforestation in cocoa.”

But to seize this moment, it is vital that the sector learns from its mistakes, or it risks repeating them. The report finds that the last two decades of interventions have failed for three main reasons.

First, efforts have only been voluntary, not mandatory, meaning that across the sector, actors are failing to do what they need to. Within the multitude of government-driven covenants, national multi-stakeholder platforms and sector-wide collaborations, there are no penalties for noncompliance from companies or governments, nor enforcement to meet targets. Ironically, however, those at the bottom – cocoa farmers often living below the poverty line – do lose their sustainable cocoa certification if they do not comply. Whilst we’ve seen a significant increase in regulatory processes and commitments to due diligence, they are limited without accountability, transparency and equitable enforcement.

Second, whilst bad farming practice has been addressed, the underlying problems that exacerbate extreme poverty – including low cocoa prices, lack of infrastructure and no transparency and accountability as you move higher in the supply chain – remain unchallenged and unsolved. There needs to be recognition that in its current form, the business model for high yields of cocoa means poverty for farmers and excessive profit for chocolate manufacturers. It’s time this changed.

Third, efforts to solve complex issues of injustice and unsustainability in the cocoa sector have not been inclusive or holistic enough. Instead of inviting farmers and civic society to take a respected seat at the decision-making table, problems have been assessed using a top-down industry-based approach. This serves the interests of industry and government, rather than the producer farmers and their communities.

“We are at the crossroads” says Isaac Gyamfi, managing director for Solidaridad in West Africa. “Do we continue skirting around the issue of farmers wellbeing, or will all stakeholders together radically redesign value distribution and decision making in the cocoa sector? Let’s make space at the table and assure a living income, for both farmers and workers”.

Acknowledging how previous interventions have failed points us to alternative pathways that can put an end to deforestation, poverty and human rights abuses in cocoa supply chains. The report makes three key recommendations:

1. Regulation that changes the system, rather than penalising the farmers
Recognising that bad farming is not the problem, but rather a symptom of a deeply unfair system, the report advocates for systems change and regulation that creates an enabling environment. Current forms of certification and farm-based standards increase pressure on farmers: instead, we need laws that hold the powerful accountable, rather than systems that demand farmers to solve systemic issues. Compliance criteria are imbalanced and need restructuring so that companies are held accountable to due diligence systems.

2. Effective partnerships between producer and consumer countries
We need partnership agreements between producer and consumer countries that facilitate and finance system change, ensuring the right policies are in place. Processes that set partnerships in motion should be inclusive and deliberative, ensuring that civil society and farmer groups have a respected voice at decision-making tables.

3. Deliver on a fair price for farmers
The single biggest positive impact for farmers and incentive for farming sustainably is delivering a fair price for the cocoa they produce. Cocoa and chocolate companies must find ways to redistribute value along the supply chain so that farmers are guaranteed a living income.

Sandra Sarkwah, Coordinator for the Ghana Civil-Society Cocoa Platform (GCCP), supports the publication of the Cocoa Barometer 2020. “Efforts of sector players to change the story of farmers keep on beating about the bush when evidence presents to us the plight of farmers, thus, low income from their hard work is a major threat to cocoa sustainability” she said. “Processors, chocolate manufacturing companies and retailers who earn a large chunk from the value chain must be fair to farmers by paying a living income and this must reach the farmer”. As recommended in the report, Sarkwah confirms “this will require the efforts of various actors, including civil society organisations in both producing and consuming countries, as well as strong farmer cooperatives to demand transparency and accountability for effective delivery of pricing policies for better farm gate prices for farmers”.

The full 2020 Cocoa Barometer report can be read here: www.cocoabarometer.org

The Cocoa Barometer is published biennially by a global consortium of civil society actors; ABVV/Horval, Be Slavery Free, European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions (EFFAT), Fair World Project, Fern, Green America, Hivos, INKOTA-netzwerk, Global Labor Justice/International Labor Rights Forum, Mighty Earth, Oxfam America, Oxfam Belgium, Rikolto, Solidaridad, Südwind Institut, Tropenbos International.

Despite two decades of efforts, the cocoa sector has still not been able to significantly reduce – let alone eliminate – child labour on West African cocoa farms. According to a new report by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago (NORC), 1.5 million children are working in cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. 95% of the child labourers are exposed to the worst forms of child labour, such as working with dangerous tools or harmful pesticides.

The main reason why the problem of child labour has not been solved is simple; it didn’t have to be eliminated. The efforts of the past two decades were entirely voluntary. Companies could engage with the problem in any manner they saw fit, and there have been exactly zero consequences for failing to meet the parade of promises made by the cocoa industry in the past decade.

The report shows that some forms of child labour are even getting worse. The strong increase of children using pesticides is an especially grave cause for concern. More than forty percent of children interviewed reported feeling very tired or even exhausted because of child labour. A third of children were in very bad pain, a quarter felt very sick, and one in ten children had to receive treatment at a medical centre. All in all, these figures are shocking, and urgent efforts must be undertaken to safeguard children from these hazards to their health. 

A companion study on the efficacy of industry interventions to reduce child labour – commissioned by the cocoa and chocolate industry – was simultaneously released. It shows that when industry does choose to invest time and effort in child labour reduction approaches, progress can be made. Though it raises the question why these investments were not made much earlier and on a larger scale, the VOICE Network welcomes the intention of several multinational cocoa and chocolate companies to roll out these programmes to all the cocoa farmers they source from. We call on all other companies to follow suit immediately. 

However, such programs reduce child labour only by roughly 30%. The main cause of child labour is poverty, and child labour will persist as long as the cocoa and chocolate industry is not serious about ensuring a living income to all cocoa farming families around the world.

Other drivers of child labour, including a lack of healthcare and education, require efforts by local governments who are responsible for the infrastructure needed for childcare and education. The VOICE Network calls on all cocoa-producing governments, but especially the Ghanaian and Ivorian governments, to dramatically improve and expand efforts to provide education and other vital services to children, and crack down on child labor and other abuses in cocoa. There is also an increasing need for clarity and ownership of the concept of child labour and child work, which should be informed by national inclusive and deliberative processes. This should be anchored in existing national legislation, which is based on the ILO Core Conventions and takes into account the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

What is needed now are mandatory due diligence regulations that cover both human rights and environmental harms, as well as an urgent plan to safeguard children from exposure to pesticides, a full roll out of child labour monitoring and remediation systems to all cocoa sourcing from West Africa, coordinated national agricultural and rural development policies and investments in infrastructure. Lastly, these must be coupled with a strong income increase to ensure cocoa farming households reach a living income, part of which must include payments of higher cocoa prices at ‘farm-gate’.