Browsing: Ivory Coast’s Coffee and Cocoa Council (CCC)

• Bittersweet consequences. Global chocolate value chains are fueling desertification across West Africa, a new report says. 
• As chocolate demand soars, Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest producer of cocoa beans is paying a huge price with 80 percent of its forest cover lost.
• Corruption fueling illegal logging and deforestation of rainforests for cocoa farms

The raw material needed to make chocolate is cocoa beans, but West Africa, which produces 40 percent of the world’s produce, is destroying its rainforests at an unprecedented pace to feed global demand.

Already, Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest producer of cocoa beans has lost 80 percent of its forest cover over in just sic decades, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports.

FAO’s Transparency, Traceability and Deforestation survey in the Ivorian cocoa supply belt shows that the unmonitored value chain of chocolate is leaving populations vulnerable to adverse effects of climate change.

Chocolate demand rising globally

Cocoa and Chocolate companies have been asked to pay more in premiums. The move which is being spearheaded by Ivory Coast and Ghana is aimed at supporting cocoa farmers’ wages.

The implementation of high premiums may however, take little longer bearing to the economic effects that have been brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Head of Ivory Coast’s Coffee and Cocoa Council (CCC) Yves Kone acknowledged that the countries have limited leverage to force the hands of companies suffering from a fall in global demand due to the pandemic.

Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together produce about two-thirds of the world’s cocoa, introduced a $400 per tonne premium this season termed the living income differential (LID) to increase wages for farmers, many of whom live in poverty.

But Ivory Coast was forced to repeatedly slash a separate quality premium that exporters pay, known as the country differential, in response to …