“THERE WILL BE NO MORE COCOA HERE” HOW COMPANIES ARE EXTRACTING THE WEST AFRICAN COCOA SECTOR TO DEATH

For decades, cocoa and chocolate companies have plundered the wealth of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. These companies extract as much value as possible from the approximately 3 million metric tons of cocoa beans painstakingly harvested each year by small-holder farmers across these two countries. In 2022, chocolate companies brought in $206 billion in revenue, and the industry is projected to generate as much as $263 billion in revenue by 2030. And yet, cocoa farmers often earn far less than the World Bank’s poverty threshold: $2.15 per day in 2022. The prices companies pay for cocoa are so low that farmers often cannot hire adult workers and instead must rely on their children or, in some cases, trafficked children, for help doing the work that cocoa cultivation requires. This failure by companies to pay a fair price for cocoa contributes directly to the human rights and environmental harms that characterize the West African cocoa sector – and despite promises by many of the largest chocolate companies over two decades ago to clean up the sector, little has changed.

Cocoa farmers still earn far below a living income, hazardous child labor remains common, and child trafficking still exists despite efforts by West African governments to combat it. Cocoa farming communities in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana face threats from all directions: companies pay exceedingly low prices for cocoa and navigate around price regulations; diseases decimate cocoa trees, making it even harder to live off cocoa farming alone; and illegal gold mining continues to take over and seep toxic chemicals into the land that cocoa farmers depend on. In September 2022, Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL) visited nine cocoa-growing villages across Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana – the two West African nations that collectively produce two-thirds of the world’s cocoa.

…Cocoa farmers and their families requested that their stories about the reality of cocoa farming be brought to the broader public: the poverty, the hard work, the difficulty paying for children’s schooling and hiring workers, the corruption within the supply chain, and the dire impact of tree-decimating diseases. In many villages, CAL staff also spoke with smaller groups of women who were eager to talk about their lives – especially details that were missing from the broader conversations in which men typically dominated.