Tag: cocoa

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Some Background to the Ivorian Crisis

Felix Houphouet-Boigny
Felix Houphouet-Boigny

As the standoff continues in the Côte d’Ivoire, I thought it’d be good to provide a little background. After all, there’s more to the story than a sore loser–Gbagbo–not wanting to give up his job as president. To get a little deeper, we have to look at how Côte d’Ivoire became the world’s largest cocoa producer.

Ivorian planters were initially slow to embrace cocoa and coffee as export crops, but once they did, they quickly ran up against the power of French planters who severely limited access to labor and other inputs. In response, the Ivorian planters formed the Syndicat Africain Agricole (SAA) in 1944. The SAA was more than an interest group. It was the training ground for a new nationalist planter class. The SAA also formed the basis for the Parti Democratique de Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI). Its leader, Houphouet-Boigny, ruled the country from 1960 until 1993.

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Uganda Aims to Expand Cocoa Production

More and more countries situated in the magic band of 20 degrees north and south of the equator are giving cocoa another look. The high prices of the moment are probably an important factor.

Uganda is not a name usually associated with cocoa. But the country has been busy expanding its cocoa acreage over the past eight years. According to Bloomberg, the state-run Cocoa Development Project expects next year’s harvest to increase by 13 percent. The expansion of cocoa is an attempt to diversify its agricultural exports that currently depend mostly on coffee and tea. These commodities contribute 22% to the GDP.

The total is still a miniscule 17,000 tons. But the trend is upward and the country expects to reach 50,000 tons by 2015/16. By comparison, the Côte d’Ivoire exported 1.2 million tons last season.

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Hershey and Social Responsibility

Last week, the Hershey company released its Corporate Social Responsibility Report. Like many of such reports, it’s full of pretty pictures and statistics. What it does not mention is that Hershey is the only large chocolate maker in the US which has not yet participated in some form of third party certification for sourcing its cocoa. I’m not talking fair trade here, I’m talking any form of third party certification.

The folks at the International Labor Rights Forum have released their own report and it highlights four areas in which Hershey should make dramatic changes:

  • Sourcing – Hershey has no system in place to ensure that its cocoa is not produced with abusive child labor;
  • Transparency – Hershey does not reveal its cocoa suppliers, making verification impossible;
  • Greenwashing – Hershey points to is donations, but, again, there’s not system in place to address child labor;
  • Certification – Hershey has refused to enter into any certification, only a few of its Dagoba line bars are certified.

Given its long history of concern for  working people and the social conscience of its founder, it remains a puzzle why Hershey is not doing the right thing when it comes to sourcing cocoa from certified reputable sources.

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Cocoa DNA Unravelled

It was only a question of time before it would happen, but on Wednesday, the New York Times (and many other news outlets) announced that two teams of scientists had sequenced the complete DNA chain of the cocoa tree. Most appropriately, the news appeared in the business section, not the science section. The two rival teams, one financed by Mars, the other a collaboration between French government laboratories and the University of Pennsylvania backed by Hershey, were quick to dispel any worries that the DNA sequence would become private property. The information will be freely available. The Mars project can be found at the Cocoa Genome Project website.

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Cargill Pays Premium

Cargill LogoCargill, the global food giant, joined the sustainability bandwagon in 2008 when the corporation joined the UTZ Certified Program for cocoa. In 2009, the first cooperatives in the Côte d’Ivoire had implemented the relevant codes of conduct and were certified by UTZ. Now, a year later, the first premium payments totaling $400,000 were made to two cooperatives–Co-operative Agricole de Fiedifoue and Coopaga.

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