Cacao Magazine - Issue Three

If you Google “Virunga” you will get a dramatic mix of good and evil, beauty and horror, rich and poor. All are prevalent, but it is what one makes of it. In the face of extreme adversity, the spirit and courage of the people who live there remains, a theory tested now as much as ever before whilst the world fights COVID-19. A challenge that has caused shockwaves throughout the globe, but for the people who have already been up against ethnic wars, centuries of foreign usurpation and Ebola, it is yet another hurdle to overcome alongside poverty, climate change and gender inequality.

In the park’s bordering countryside and beyond, life for women is especially hard. Collecting water, gathering firewood, making and caring for children is their life’s work - with little respite or opportunity for much else. I​n a place where girls’ education is as undervalued as much as their abuse is ignored, there is a movement stirring. Through growing and harvesting fine cacao, through working together and leading teams of hundreds, and through playing an active role in the supply chain of fine chocolate, the women of Virunga are demanding peace and prosperity where it has been absent for far too long.

Every Great Park Needs a Great Buffer

The Virunga National Park was first founded and named ‘Park Albert’ in 1925, with the primary goal of protecting the endangered mountain gorillas that live across the Virunga Massif. In 1979, it was renamed Virunga National Park and designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Sadly, by 1994 it was labelled an Endangered Heritage site, due to environmental damage fuelled by conflict, refugees settling amongst the park borders, and poachers and rebel groups posing a threat to the park and its protected species. Over the years, despite the brave and fearless rangers who dedicate their lives to protecting the park’s animals, many have been killed in a series of horrifying incidents carried out by local militia.

The Oscar-nominated 2014 documentary “Virunga” tells a vivid and emotional story of these complex interests that have included mass gorilla killings and culminated in, as recently as the 24th of April 2020, the death of dozens of heroic rangers. The rangers are the police forces charged to protect national parks. Their mandate ends at the borders of the park and their success in keeping the native environment intact depends on what happens outside of the park, in what is aptly called the buffer zone.

Buffer zones create a barrier between protected areas and the communities and developments beyond them. The UN says they may not be “sites of active biodiversity conservation, but their establishment provides an additional layer of protection to existing areas of biodiversity importance,” and that, “they are often fundamental to achieving conservation of those areas.” Ideally, they are controlled or managed landscapes that shield nature from people in a responsible and mutually beneficial way. Cacao is known as one of the world’s most powerful buffer crops, since it allows for rainforests and people to thrive simultaneously.

To put into perspective what Congo and the world stands to lose if the park is not protected, the WWF states that “Virunga National Park is home to no less than 627 herbaceous plant species, 126 species of creeper and 107 different species of tree. Of these species, 92 are endemic to the region. The park also boasts 218 different species of mammal, 706 bird species, 109 species of reptile and 78 different amphibian species. It is the only national park to feature 3 different species of great ape: the mountain gorilla, the eastern lowland gorilla and the chimpanzee. Poaching aside, the biggest threat to the survival of such rich biodiversity is the destruction of its habitat through deforestation and forest degradation.”

In 2013 the WWF estimated Virunga’s economic value at US $48.9 million a year. In a stable situation conducive to economic growth and tourism, they determined the park’s annual value could be higher than US $1.1 billion per year and, including existing positions, it could be the source of more than 45,000 jobs.

Building a Regenerative Consumer Society

Few forests in the world have seen such immense pressure on them as the Virunga landscape. Decades of war throughout Congo and its neighbouring countries have caused the displacement of millions of people in and around Virunga park, and most of them rely on subsistence farming as a source of both income and food. Unsustainable farming practices have led to a spike in deforestation and a gradual encroachment on the park. Coffee was one of the main cash crops grown within Virunga’s buffer zone for several decades, due to the fertile soil and ideal growing conditions. However, plant disease was increasingly damaging the regional coffee plants and destroying the harvest that so many farmers desperately relied upon.

Hilde de Beule, who is an agronomist and expert in sustainable agriculture, was working in the region at the time. She was always interested in the idea of introducing agroforestry grown cacao as a crop alternative to coffee for the people of eastern DRC. This dream became a reality when she met Philipp Kauffmann in 2008, who had recently founded the conservation chocolate company, Original Beans. Philipp was already a seasoned environmental activist from a 220-yearold family of nature conservationists. He had a vision for a “regenerative consumer society,” which he realised he could accomplish through the production of chocolate.

A partnership was established and they began by training the local farmers to sustainably grow, maintain, and harvest cacao trees. By 2009, the first batch of single origin cacao from the war-torn DRC was flown to Europe and made into chocolate. An independent study in 2012 revealed that within just three years, over 13,000 farmers had become trained and certified cacao producers. These farmers’ incomes had doubled from US $500 to $1000 a year. Additionally, one million trees had been planted and deforestation rates within and around the park had been halved.

One Bar: One Tree

Replanting trees and conserving biodiversity has been a guiding principle for Original Beans from the start. They’ve developed a ‘one bar: one tree’ programme, which means growing a tree for every bar sold, a tree that consumers can track with a code on the packaging of their bar. To date, they have grown over two million trees, and in 2015 they became a 100% climate positive company.

Original Beans currently operate 26 tree nurseries in addition to various community-driven forest conservation projects across Africa and Latin America, with a focus on sourcing and preserving rare cacao varieties. With each 100g of chocolate or couverture they produce they drawdown more than the equivalent amount of CO​2 in their cacao forests.

In an interview with Jenny Linford for the UK chocolate blog ​ www.chocolatier.co.uk, Philipp explained, “the interesting thing about the chocolate industry is that it has a direct relationship to some of the poorest people in the world. These people have direct access to, and control over, one of the world’s most precious resources on our planet, which are tropical rainforests. Chocolate is a very charismatic product with direct access to these issues of poverty and deforestation. We have a tremendous opportunity to change the paradigm of what chocolate is, how cacao is produced – this is an industry which needs a substantial, fundamental change.”

Strong Women Make Strong Chocolate

Philipp and his global Bean Team know that to protect biodiversity, communities need to be protected too, and that includes women. Chantal Marijnissen, Head of Unit for Environment, Natural Resources and Water at The Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development at the European Commission, outlined that “environmental projects will only work if we make sure we provide security for the populations around the parks, reduce the impact of the militia on the local populations, and create jobs.”

Hilde, who in the meantime had become leader of Original Bean’s African Bean Team, realised that the key to protecting Virunga National Park was to empower women. And so she set course on a new project, the ​Femmes de Virunga. Despite Congo being one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman, the Femmes de Virunga project became the world’s first women-led cacao cooperative in 2016. To date, hundreds of women, who, like their bars, are known as Femmes de Virunga, have joined together to plant a quarter of a million cacao trees and 40,000 shade crops. Resulting in successfully maintaining the buffer-zone and purifying the air, all whilst growing delicious-tasting and financially beneficial cacao.

Hilde described, in a video published by Original Beans in 2014, how “women are in a weak and dependent position and are often the first victims when political unrest takes place. With this work that we’re currently doing we hope to strengthen the position of these women within the family and within the larger community by involving them in cocoa-growing, and sharing the know-how on cultivation and processing.”

The women of Virunga are paid a fixed premium price for their cacao, provided with literacy courses, ongoing Ebola protection, and leadership training. Through their dedication and Original Bean’s training, they have become masters at growing, fermenting and drying these fully traceable, certified organic beans. Beans which are then turned into worldclass chocolate, sold and loved all over the world. As essential as these projects are, and as inspiring as their ethics may be, people don’t buy chocolate because it does good, they buy it because it tastes good. And Original Beans have that sorted, too. Their chocolate tastes so good that they’ve won countless awards and it’s used by some of the world’s most well renowned chefs, including Massimo Bottura, Claire Smyth, and Jamie Oliver.

The Femmes de Virunga project has successfully demonstrated that environmental conservation doesn’t have to come at the cost of economic growth. Equipping female farmers with the skills to sustainably grow fine cacao has not only provided them with greater financial and social freedom, however, it’s strengthened the buffer-zone around the park for years to come. Perhaps the spirit of the Femmes de Virunga echoes even more powerfully now at a time in which we want to step out of the COVID-19 crisis and resume protecting our own families, livelihoods and the world at large.

As consumers, our job is simple. By supporting and eating sustainable chocolate we can directly influence the conservation of the world’s natural resources whilst positively changing the lives of the women that live there. Peace and prosperity should be possible for women wherever in the world they are, and so should great tasting chocolate that doesn’t damage the earth. Who would have thought that the answer could be found by wrapping them together in a bar of chocolate?

To support Original Beans and the strong women of Virunga visit: www.originalbeans.com/femmes-de-virunga-congo/

You can also donate to the Virunga National Park and become an integral part of the effort to save one of the Earth’s most special treasures at: www.virunga.org/donate