Chocolate will now be safe and sustainable
Sustainability is all about doing the right thing and looking to the future. Although that is not the formal definition, the principle has been taken up by the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF).
Cocoa is the base material for one of the most popular foods in the world – chocolate. The material comes from the cacao bean, which is predominately grown in the tropical areas in Africa, and particularly in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire (The Ivory Coast).
To keep costs low, historically the growers and harvesters of these beans have been poorly paid and treated, including the use of child labour. This has raised the very real concern of the sustainability of cocoa and therefore chocolate.
With the Ebola virus now common in these two countries, there is a very real risk that cocoa will not be available for some time. This added to the sustainability issues of the bean farming, has prompted the WCF and it’s members to make some significant decisions at it’s recent convention in Copenhagen, Denmark.
CocoaAction has now been implemented and is a strategy designed to improve the lives of the cocoa farmers through better productivity and support of community development. It is intended that there will be work being done with at least 300 000 cocoa farmers by 2020.
The strategy has been agreed to by 11 of the world’s biggest chocolate related companies to date and has a set of expected key performance indicators that each must work on, measure and report.
The President of the World Cocoa Foundation, Bill Guyton, said; “Our industry is at a critical moment, and CocoaAction is our strategy to ensure that collective cocoa sustainability efforts go deeper and wider. With CocoaAction, industry leaders are embarking on an unprecedented effort to improve farmers’ lives and ensure they benefit more from the cocoa they grow. This meeting has been critical in engaging all stakeholders in helping to co-create the future of standards, measurement and certification.”
The convention also included an announcement by the WCFG leadership of a donation of more than $700 000 toward the fight against Ebola in the cocoa growing areas. The money will be donated to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and Caritas
Written by Rachelle Williams, The Green Food Safety Coach.