The Missing Ingredient for Sustainable Chocolate — The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs

Jun 7

Jun 7 The Missing Ingredient for Sustainable Chocolate

By Dr. Julian Oram

In April 2022, a coalition of civil society organisations published a controversial ranking of chocolate companies and cocoa traders with regards to their sustainability policies and practices. The Chocolate Scorecard, which has been published annually in various forms since 2018, rated companies on their performance against six key indicators of responsible cocoa sourcing – Traceability & Transparency, Child Labor, Living Income, Deforestation & Climate, Agroforestry, and Agrichemical Management. Based on a comprehensive methodology, the scorecard assessed companies on each of these criteria, and provided color coded chocolate egg to represent how they are faring.

At the top of the leaderboard of “good eggs” were the chocolate brands Beyond Good, Alter Eco, Tony’s Chocolonely, and Whitakers. The research also highlighted progress by companies including Ferrero, Hershey, Nestlé, RitterSport, and Fazer. Other companies performed far less well, such as Godiva and Kelloggs, while a few “broken eggs”, like Starbucks and Storck, did not engage with the survey at all, thereby leaving their customers in the dark with regards to how they are addressing critical issues such as poverty wages, deforestation, and pesticide use in their cocoa supply chains.

From an environmental perspective, the good news is that, over the five-year period that the Scorecard has been published, there has been considerable progress by individual companies to ensure that the cocoa they are directly purchasing or selling is free from deforestation. This has largely been achieved by companies publishing and implementing sustainable cocoa sourcing policies, which obligate their buyers to check that the cocoa they purchase from farmer cooperatives has not come from areas deforested for cocoa production.

These efforts show a welcome willingness by industry actors to address a problem which has long flown under the radar. For many years, the world’s leading chocolate manufacturers ignored the fact that the main ingredient in their products, cocoa, was wreaking havoc in the forests of West Africa, destroying the habitats of wildlife such as critically endangered chimpanzees, forest elephants, and rare pygmy hippos.

The expansion in cocoa production in the region has contributed to some of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. Over the past thirty years, Ghana is estimated to have lost 65% of its forest cover, while Côte d’Ivoire has lost nearly 90% of its forests. In September 2017, Mighty Earth (one of the organizations behind the Scorecard) published a major investigation that revealed the scale of forest devastation in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, which between them account for 60 percent of world cocoa production.

At the November 2017 UN Climate Change Conference, the governments of these two countries – along with big cocoa traders and leading chocolate manufacturers within the World Cocoa Foundation, including Nestlé, Hershey’s, Mondelēz, and Mars – signed the Cocoa & Forests Initiative Framework for Action. This was followed in early 2019 by the publication of detailed action plans, raising hopes that companies across the cocoa supply chain would finally take decisive measures to end deforestation caused by the expansion of cocoa plantations in West Africa.

But four years later, the promise of the Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI) remains largely illusive. Although the Chocolate Scorecard shows that many companies are making positive individual efforts to prevent cocoa-driven deforestation through better supply chain mapping, satellite data analysis, and direct engagement with farmer cooperatives, rates of forest loss in cocoa growing regions of West Africa remain high. In February 2022, Mighty Earth published new research which provided evidence of ongoing tropical forest destruction in the key cocoa-growing regions of both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. This includes deforestation in designated protected areas that provide vital habitats for endangered wildlife and critical carbon sinks, as well as being home to indigenous and local communities.

The report revealed that, since the CFI Action Plans were published in January 2019, cocoa growing regions within Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana have lost an area of tropical forest equivalent to the size of the cities of Chicago, Madrid, or Seoul. Côte d'Ivoire is estimated to have lost 19,421 hectares over the past three years, equivalent to 2 percent of its total remaining forest cover. Over the same period, Ghana is estimated to have lost an astonishing 39,497 ha. of forest, comprising 4 percent of its remaining forest cover. Canopy loss is still found throughout protected areas of both countries, with satellite data analysis and observations from Mighty Earth’s field investigation team in Côte d'Ivoire revealing cocoa expansion’s major role in this encroachment.

While there are no quick fixes, devastation at this scale is entirely preventable. Efforts by companies to “clean up” their direct supply chains are a much-needed start, but do not offer a solution in and of themselves. Much of the cocoa bought by commodity buyers is purchased via local traders, who buy cocoa from various farmer cooperatives, making the precise origin of this cocoa much harder to pinpoint. These indirect cocoa supply chains account for about 50 percent of the cocoa imported into Europe, the main destination for West African cocoa. For that "black box" cocoa, companies need to set up landscape-level joint monitoring initiatives to pool supply chain data, which should be made publicly available to increase overall transparency and accountability. 

The cocoa industry could be collectively monitoring tree cover loss in cocoa-growing areas using by tools similar to Mighty Earth's Cocoa Accountability Map – which layers deforestation alerts from satellite imagery on top of data showing the location of cocoa cooperatives, as well as supply chain information that shows the companies buying from those cooperatives.

Cocoa traders and chocolate manufacturers have a lot more resources than NGOs like Mighty Earth, and could easily develop similar tools. They should collaborate to deliver the publicly transparent monitoring systems that have been promised since the launch of the CFI, and redouble their efforts with government agencies, civil society actors, and local communities to prevent further forest clearances.

As both the Chocolate Scorecard and Mighty Earth’s latest deforestation findings demonstrate, these collective measures are not superfluous options. Without adding joint monitoring and action to prevent deforestation into the mix of ingredients, the recipe for a sustainable cocoa industry will continue to prove elusive.