Cocoa is one of the world’s most savoured products, mainly in the form of chocolate. Chocolate is something we all love – we reach for it in times of celebration and joy, stress and sadness, and just to sweeten our day. This simple pleasure, though, has complex and harsh consequences for those who produce cocoa.
Cocoa

Why? Securing Cocoa's Future
Chocolate. It melts in your mouth, and can be sweet or bitter on the tongue. Chocolate is an affordable luxury enjoyed all over the world. However, while in recent years, consumers have received a two cent discount on a bar of chocolate, farmers have been pushed to desperation. Since September 2016, the price of cocoa per tonne has fallen from an average of $3000 to $2000. In addition, local forests in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana have been transformed into cocoa plantations to increase production.
Farm
The journey from bean to chocolate bar begins on the farm. Worldwide, over 4 million metric tonnes of cocoa are produced annually, with Ivory Coast and Ghana accounting for over half of the world’s total output. Many farmers work on small plots of land, with farmers from the Ivory Coast producing cocoa on 1-3 hectares plots.
Cocoa beans are harvested by hand-picking mature pods from cocoa trees. The pods, which can contain as many as 50 beans, are then carefully opened. The beans are removed from the pulp and left in piles covered by banana leaves to be heated by the sun. They are dried, bagged, and then shipped to manufacturers.
Factory
Between 400-600 cocoa beans are needed to make 1 kilogram of chocolate. During the manufacturing process the cocoa beans are transformed into the chocolate bar. At the factory, beans undergo cleaning, roasting, grinding, moulding, and other processes. Depending on the type of chocolate desired—white, dark, or milk— different ingredients are blended.
Dark chocolate, which is enjoying increasingly larger shares of the chocolate market, is made by mixing sugar, cocoa liquor, cocoa butter, and occasionally vanilla. Chocolate manufacturers often have their own special chocolate blends, further offering variations on basic chocolate production formulas.
Supermarket
After production, beans and chocolate are stored and shipped to stores all over the world. Ivory Coast and Ghana may be the world’s largest producers, but the largest cocoa bean importers are the Netherlands and the United States, followed by Germany, Malaysia, Belgium, and France.
The majority of cocoa produced by farmers in the Ivory Coast and Ghana finds its way onto grocery store shelves in the Netherlands, the United States, Malaysia, and Japan. 45% of all chocolate is purchased here, while another 27% is broken off in smaller grocery stores, making chocolate a regular part of diets around the globe.
Challenges Damage to people and the environment
The global demand for cocoa is rising. Yet the majority of the world’s cocoa producers are stuck in a cycle of poverty, unable to meet personal needs and global demand.
People
Breaking the poverty cycle
Smallholders produce 95% of all cocoa, usually on plots between 1-3 hectares. Many of these smallholders live in West Africa, which produces 70% of the world’s cocoa. Millions of farmers depend on cocoa to make a living, only to be faced with unproductive fields, being unable to turn their product into sustenance.
The smallholders and producer organisations involved in cocoa production suffer from a lack of knowledge when it comes to agricultural practices. Producers cannot easily access training, inputs, markets, or financing. This leads to either a complete lack of inputs or a misuse of what inputs can be obtained. This results in low, poor quality yields.
Women, working alongside children and other family members, must often complete household duties in addition to working in the fields. Men generally occupy the highest paying jobs, which are also the most physically demanding, with women facing this wage and occupational discrimination. Although it is not uncommon for women who head households in West Africa to grow cocoa, they are often left out of farmer cooperatives and organisations.
In places like Ghana, where low yields are acute, after experiencing growing up poor and seeing their parents struggle to make ends meet, youth are increasingly choosing not to take up cocoa farming. Given all the human costs of cocoa production, the next generation is leaving cocoa production in great numbers and opting to grow more profitable crops or move to the city.
Environment
Cycles of destruction
Cocoa is produced in some of the world’s most vibrant environments that flourish with biodiversity. One of the strengths of cocoa is that it can actually help conserve this biodiversity, provided it’s produced sustainably. But it’s often not.
In the quest to satiate our hunger for chocolate and other cocoa products, forests are cleared to make room for cocoa farms, reducing the biodiversity of the very ecosystems farms depend on to survive. A reduction in biodiversity lowers the amount of nutrients in the soil, which in turn reduces yields. The result of this is usually more deforestation to gain access to more fertile soil.
Contributing towards climate change is another effect of current cocoa production practices. Often forests are cleared in Central Africa to make way for agricultural production. This affects the climate of West Africa because the Central African forests incubate the weather systems that cover West Africa with rain. When there is less rain, there is less cocoa because rainfall is the most important climatic factor in cocoa production.
Solution We bring people together
We believe in a market transformation approach that works simultaneously with farmers, markets, consumers and governments – where one cannot make progress without the other. We bring all supply chain actors together to secure the future of cocoa farming.
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Farmers
Since the start of our programme in 2007, significant progress has been made at the farmer level. However more needs to be done to make a real difference; many farmers still don’t see a future in cocoa farming.
Farmers with knowledge and skills – and access to credit and fertiliser – are three times as productive as their colleagues. This is not only good for farmers; it means that companies can also rely on a steady supply of good cocoa.
The cocoa sector contributes to the living and working conditions of farmers, farm workers and their families. Training farmers has resulted in a 28% increase in income in Ivory Coast and a 13% increase in Ghana. This has resulted in increased household security, with more money being spent on food, clothing, and education. Farmers in our programmes are organised, skilled and entrepreneurial. High yielding cocoa production systems enhance ecosystem services and improve local food security.
Female farmers have also benefitted from our programmes. In Ivory Coast, self-help groups where 600 women were trained on safe pesticide use, HIV/AIDS, water and sanitation use, and malaria prevention were organised. 30 women have also begun their own cocoa nurseries, selling 130,000 seedlings to achieve financial independence.
"I am a member of the cooperative and learned in training programmes. As a result, my yields are high, I have more income and I'm teaching other farmers now."
Enan Abblé Cocoa farmer Kragui, Ivorycoast
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Engaging businesses and goverments
Companies and governments are an integral part of sustainability in the cocoa industry. These entities can assist in increasing access, availability and affordability of inputs, knowledge and credit for sustainable cocoa.
For years, governments, companies and Solidaridad have been investing in improving cocoa production. Thanks to public-private cooperation, about 20% of the 2.5 million cocoa farmers in West Africa now receive support with training and access to support.
Our Cocoa Improvement Programme has resulted in around 151,000 farmers being UTZ certified from 2008-2012. Here, as in all of our programmes, certification was used as a tool towards sustainability in combination with knowledge and local capacity building.
In Ghana, a programme driven by a public-private platform, and financed by the Dutch government, focuses on new delivery models. These Rural Service Delivery Centers centre on training, inputs and credit with a special emphasis on rehabilitation and intensification, all of which are necessary for long-term sustainability.
We also seek to involve industry participants in innovative ways. From 2013-2014, we ran a multimedia exhibit, ‘For the Love of Chocolate’, that shows the cocoa production process and how it can be improved.
This is how we help cocoa become sustainable.
Join us Support our work
Growing cocoa can give millions of farmers in West Africa and elsewhere the prospect of a better future without poverty. This will only be possible if farmers, companies, governments and development organisations cooperate and invest more in sustainable cocoa production. Support the work done by Solidaridad and make a difference for the love of cocoa.
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