Unwrap Cocoa

The cocoa industry

For many of us chocolate is pure pleasure, a little bit of heaven that you eat. However, the real story of chocolate is a supply chain where our affordable luxury is paid for in misery and exploitation. The earnings model of chocolate companies is farmer poverty, this is the way it has been for decades and will continue to be unless the correct laws are put in place. As long as the farmer is paying the price of cheap chocolate, there’s no way it can be sustainable. The poverty for these poor farmers is so dire it could be considered modern slavery.

Chocolate’s dark side

Chocolate is the most popular sweet treat in the world. People around the world, mostly in Europe and the United States, consume more than 3 million tons of cocoa beans a year, and, not only does eating chocolate make you feel good, it may also be good for your heart and your brain.

Chocolate is a product of the cacao bean, which grows primarily in the tropical climates of Western Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The cacao bean is more commonly referred to as cocoa, so that is the term that will be used throughout this book. Western African countries, mostly Ghana and the Ivory Coast, supply more than 70% of the world’s cocoa. The cocoa they grow and harvest is sold to a majority of chocolate companies, including the largest in the world. The Industrial Revolution allowed chocolate to be mass-produced and brought the treat to the masses. The popularity led to the development of cacao tree plantations.

Enslaved people farmed most of the plantations. Initially, Spanish colonizers forced Mesoamericans to farm the cacao plantations. When the indigenous peoples began to die in large numbers from diseases brought by Europeans, enslaved Africans were brought over to make up the labour shortage. In addition to sugarcane, indigo and other crops, enslaved Africans planted, maintained and harvested cacao trees throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America to feed the new European taste for chocolate.

In recent years, a handful of organisations and journalists have exposed the wide spread use of child labour, and in some cases slavery, on cocoa farms in Western Africa. Since then, the industry has become increasingly secretive, making it difficult for reporters to not only access farms where human rights violations still occur, but to then disseminate this information to the public. The farms of Western Africa supply cocoa to international giants such as Hershey’s, Mars, and Nestlé, revealing the industry’s direct connection to the worst forms of child labour, human trafficking, and slavery.

In Western Africa, cocoa is a commodity crop grown primarily for export; 60% of the Ivory Coast’s export revenue comes from its cocoa. As the chocolate industry has grown over the years, so has the demand for cheap cocoa. As a result, they often resort to the use of child labour to keep their prices competitive.

Growing chocolate

The journey of an extraordinary bean

Consumers are so out of touch with how food is made in general, when it comes to chocolate most people don’t know what a cocoa pod looks like, or know that cocoa beans start their life as being a white, pulpy substance. The harvesting of cocoa could very well be considered medieval, this is because the process hasn’t changed and is still being cultivated using the same techniques. This is highly likely due to the fact if you pay the labourers virtually nothing then there is not a lot of incentive to invest money into expensive machinery.

The trees are native to the Amazon and Orinoco river basins in South America. The trees are widely distributed from south eastern Mexico to the Amazon River. They thrive in hot, humid areas within about 20 degrees of the equator, according to Cornell. As the popularity of chocolate spread, growers established plantations in other regions, such as West Africa and South and Southeast Asia. Today, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil account for 79 percent of the world’s cacao production.

Cacao trees bear fruit that are about the same size and shape of a papaya. These bumpy, lumpy berries, or pods, are full of up to 50 sour seeds, or beans, covered in white pulp. The tree grows large fleshy fruits continuously throughout the year along its trunk. The location of the seed pods on the trees, each containing 30 to 50 seeds, make it an easy product to harvest by hand. In fact, it is estimated that during harvest, a worker can pick around 650 pods per day, which is an amount sufficient to make roughly 65 pounds of chocolate.

Cacao seeds are harvested by hand because machines could injure the trees, according to Cornell. Workers remove the pods, which are orange when they are ripe, and open them with a machete. The seeds are placed in large fermentation trays that are stacked and covered in banana leaves, where they are left for two to seven days. Fermentation produces the chocolate flavor and aroma. It also destroys the seed’s embryo, preventing unwanted germination, and causes the white pulp to fall away from the seeds.

After fermenting, the beans dry out on sunny platforms. Workers turn them several times a day for three to five days to complete drying. The beans can dry faster in rotary dryers but sun-dried beans taste the best, according to Cornell. Next, the beans are taken to the chocolate factory, where they are cleaned and debris is removed. The beans are roasted in large, rotating ovens. The roasting draws out flavour and removes the beans from their hulls. Roasted beans go into a winnowing machine, which cracks the beans and removes hulls. The remaining part of the bean is called the nib. Nibs become chocolate. The nibs are ground down under a series of rollers. This process results in a thick paste called chocolate liquor, which is the main source of unsweetened baking chocolate.

Growing

Drying

Rocky road ahead

There are nearly 2 million cocoa-growing households in Ivory Coast and Ghana, and the majority of cocoa produced worldwide is grown by small holders, with the average farm size in these countries sitting at less than 10 acres. Cocoa grown in the Ivory Coast makes up 43% of the total world crop and 60% of the country’s export revenue, while nearly 40% of the population is involved in cocoa farming.

The farmers who grow our cocoa beans are underpaid and exploited, this means they aren’t earning enough for basic human rights such as food, education and housing.

The remote towns where this is produced is rooted with poverty with poor infrastructure, there may not be running water or electricity, but the aroma of chocolate can be across the whole village. The chocolate industry is one of the wealthier industries in the world, they are estimated to make over $100 billion a year, however most farmers make less than $1 a day. An average farmer would only gain $200 a year which is hardly a living wage. This industry allows the exploitation of children, forcing them to work in plantations as slaves.

This made headline news in 2000, with many in western countries threatening to boycott the chocolate companies due to horrific child labour reports. Although the companies said they would fix this by 2005, this goal was not met, and a decade later this outrage has been submerged in cultural debate and the paramount requirement for the African governments: keep the cocoa moving. In west Africa alone, over 1.3 million, many of which are children, are doing illegal work.

Approximately 2.1 million children in the Ivory Coast and Ghana may be exposed to the worst child labour conditions on cocoa farms. Many of these children are slaves as they are trafficked to farms, unable to leave, and forced to work without pay. As the chocolate industry has grown over the years, so has the demand for cheap cocoa.

Many children in Western Africa live in poverty, so begin working at a young age to support their families. Some children end up on cocoa farms because traffickers tell them that the job pays well, whilst others are sold to traffickers or farm owners by their relatives who, unaware of the danger and exploitation, believe that they will find honest work and send some of their earnings home. Traffickers also abduct young children from small villages in neighbouring countries. At least 12,000 child cocoa workers have been trafficked from neighbouring nations. Many of these children will never see their families again.

Making trade fair

The farms of Western Africa supply cocoa to the international giants such as Hershey’s, Mars, and Nestlé, showing how these corporations are directly connected to the worst forms of child labour and slavery. It’s almost impossible to find a perfect product in any industry, so admittedly it is difficult to find things that are going to stand up when it comes to environmental, economic and social factors. So for a start, don’t beat yourself up, but try and learn more and opt to buy better.

Chocolate is one of the world’s favourite foods but growing cocoa is a hard task. Fairtrade is helping to make it more sustainable. 90% of the world’s cocoa is grown on small family farms by about 6 million farmers who earn their living from growing and selling cocoa beans.

Cocoa trees grow in tropical environments, within 10 degrees latitude from the equator. The ideal climate for growing cocoa is hot, rainy, and tropical, with lush vegetation to provide shade for the cocoa trees. The primary growing regions are Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana produce over 60% of global cocoa supply. Cocoa is a delicate and sensitive crop, and farmers must protect trees from wind, sun, pests, and disease. With proper care, cocoa trees begin to yield pods at peak production levels by the fifth year, and they can continue at this level for 10 years. But for all this hard work, cocoa farmers gain very little from a very profitable global cocoa trade.

Between 2016 and 2017 global cocoa prices dropped by more than a third, disease and age are damaging cocoa trees and the number of farmers is falling because the benefits are so poor that few young people want to stay in the profession - the average age of a cocoa farmer is over 50. Farmers aren’t benefiting sufficiently and remain in poverty as their income fails to keep up with rising production costs and household expenses.

Fairtrade helps to make cocoa farming more sustainable through payment of the Fairtrade Premium. Fairtrade Premium is unique to Fairtrade and is an additional sum of money paid over and above the Fairtrade price. It goes into a communal fund for the workers and farmers to invest - for example in business or community projects - enabling them to better provide for themselves and their communities.