cocoa Fair Trade

As in many other cases, cocoa Fair Trade has come to change for the better farmers' lives; lives which normally contrast sharply with the sweet and tasty produce they grow. But, you know, Fair Trade is that one in which we put persons first, so that economy serves people, not the other way round. Please proceed ...

culture bites

Cocoa comes from a tree, Theobroma cacao L., native to tropical America. It is a shortish tree which grows better with high humidity, rich soils and under the shade of other trees. Its fruits are called pods; they are about 30 cm long and weight some 500 gr; they grow directly from the trunk and older branches. A single tree may render about 20 pods a year, starting at age of five until it is 40 or so.

cocoa pod, butter and beans. Photo by swamibu

Cocoa pods contain some 50 cocoa beans which are quite fatty: they may contain up to 45% of cocoa butter and a little of a caffeine-like alkaloid, theobromine. When ripe, cocoa pods are picked, opened and cocoa beans are taken along with a white pulp that surounds them; husks and an inner white membrane are discarded. It takes the content of about 10 pods to prepare 1 kg of chocolate.

Cocoa beans processing starts with a fermentation, along several days, which both eliminates the pulp and modifies the flavor, rendering cleaner and less bitter beans. This done, fermented beans are dried, usually under the sun during several days.

Once fermented and dried, beans are washed, roasted (removing their husk either before or after it) and then become just nibs; cocoa nibs are ground into cocoa paste -sometimes called liquor-. This cocoa paste can be separated into cocoa butter and cocoa powder, products from which delicious chocolate, or whatever, is finally made.

Ancient central american cultures already loved it several centuries B.C., and considered it to be of a divine origin (not surprisingly wink ). Cocoa was then used mostly as a drink and also served as currency.

the usual, unFair trade

According to the World Cocoa Foundation, about 45 million people over the world depend on cocoa for their livelihood.

Similarly to other commodity crops, like coffee, prices for cocoa beans are set by "investors" in London and New York stock exchanges, artificially causing large variations on its price. As you may imagine, these price changes are not beared by large transnationals who dominate the market but by... small-scale farmers.

After harvesting the pods, farmers may find that the income they get does not cover production costs, let alone that they have almost no maneuver capacity. Between 2000 and 2003, prices went from a 27-year low to a 16-year high! A three-fold change... did you notice it on your chocolate bar price tag? I didn't.

cocoa prices. Graphic by FLO

Today, about 40% of world cocoa comes from Côte d'Ivoire, with neighbor Ghana and Indonesia producing each a 15% of it. Some asian and american countries also do their share. As you may imagine, conditions there are not as good as they could be for producers: Côte d'Ivoire is a quite agitated country, where forced child labor was common a few years ago. Reports mentioned that children, by the thousands, were involved in hazardous works. Wages earned by adults can be well below the poverty line.

Well... when speaking about the cocoa processing, I forgot to mention a "minor" step: exportation. Producing countries do not process the 3 million tonnes of cocoa beans they make. Import duties in the North are much lower for raw produce than for manufactured items, which encourages the processing of the beans near the consumer countries. There are also some technical reasons for this, like perishability and deterioration issues.

That's enough for the economical side. As for Nature, let's only say that cocoa is the second most sprayed crop in the world, only after cotton. Chemicals use is quite high.

Fortunately, Fair Trade offers an alternative to this...

a Fair cocoa

Fair Trade fights poverty. Photo by C. Guthier

As we have seen, cocoa farmers suffer from price unstability, but, as Fair Trade principles include paying a Fair price and establishing a long-term relationship, cocoa Fair Trade frees producers from uncertainty thanks to the minimum price established and to the Premium paid on top of it (beautifully shown at the chart above).

We can lend a hand to cocoa Fair Trade producers by spreading the word: Fair Trade really helps people. Getting things as simple as a water pump can make a huge difference in a west african village, and those things are happenning now.

As of december 2006 there were 21 cocoa registered producers; among the largest of them is Kuapa Kokoo, from Ghana, which gathers some 45.000 farmers. They are somehow unusal because, besides producing raw cocoa, also own a 45% share of Divine chocolate company.

In America we can mention Conacado; they are from the Dominican Republic and they are the first ones producing cocoa with biodynamic agriculture.

Cocoa Fair Trade is still a tiny fraction of the total world market; in fact, producers can't sell all their output on this market, so they sell the rest to the ordinary traders. The way to go is clear: we must eat more Fair Trade chocolate! to boost cocoa Fair Trade.

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